For more than a decade, Patrik Svensson has been relentlessly documenting, imagining and, now, reimagining the physical and conceptual meeting places that bring together the digital and the humanities. Svensson’s work has been at the center not only of my own work to situate the lab I run, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL), in and around the digital/humanities as well as my attempts to better attune the spatial design and infrastructure of the MAL so it becomes more welcoming to diverse approaches to research and creative practice; but it has also been at the center of the turn in digital humanities toward expanding its sense of itself as a field – an expansion that beginning to include an infrastructural sensibility along with an attention to issues previously aligned more with media studies (for example, new materialist studies) or cultural studies (for example, the politics of gender, race, and intersectionality). In the interview below, conducted over email throughout the summer and fall of 2017, you’ll find Svensson bring all the aforementioned issues together as he discusses his role as Director of HUMlab at Umeå University in Sweden from 2001 to 2014 (an astonishingly long tenure considering the relatively short life span of humanities labs in general). While he was director, HUMlab became known as one of the most elaborate, productive, and likely one of the most well funded humanities labs in North America and Europe; by the end of his tenure, it included ten faculty from across the university, fifteen staff, 1100 square meters (or roughly 11800 square feet) of lab space on two separate campuses, more than ten externally funded research projects, involvement in numerous educational efforts on and off campus, roughly twenty-five scholarly publications per year, and a network of international collaborators spanning the globe (mostly Europe and the Anglo-American world). Svensson also revisits the series of four essays he published in Digital Humanities Quarterly from 2009 to 2012 which consistently used HUMlab as a case study to, as he put it, “broadly [explore] the digital humanities in terms of its discursive shift from humanities computing to digital humanities, the evolving disciplinary landscape, associated epistemic commitments and primary modes of engagement, underlying cyberinfrastructure, visions and hopes invested, and possible future directions” (Svensson 2012). And, finally, he reflects on how his thinking on digital/humanities/infrastructure has changed and perhaps even become more expansive or sensitive to diverse participants and diverse modes of participation since he has lived in New York City and now Los Angeles.

This is one of three extended interviews my co-authors, Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka, and I will feature in our project that is both website (whatisamedialab.com) and book (THE LAB BOOK: Situated Studies in Media Studies, University of Minnesota Press). Our book is both a long history of the arts/humanities media lab as well as an analysis of how anything – from a podcast, a reading group or an idea to even a line of men’s grooming products – is now a lab; it is also a meditation on what is or could be a uniquely humanities lab. As such, to be clear, this interview is more than just about the trajectory of Svensson as a thinker, writer and administrator; it is about documenting a particularly successful and influential moment in the recent history of humanities infrastructure en route to creating what we hope will be an important contribution to the design of humanities infrastructure in and for the future.

Emerson: You’ve written extensively and compellingly about humanities infrastructure, especially in your recent book Big Digital Humanities, and many of your points are supported by your extensive work at HUMlab at Umeå University. But I am interested in hearing, first, about experiences you might have had in arts/humanities labs before HUMlab. Can you describe your pre-HUMlab experiences with these sorts of labs and how or whether HUMlab built on or departed from these early experiences?

Svensson: I was fairly junior at the time. I had just come back after a year at UC Berkeley as a finishing Ph.D. student. I do not think I reflected on it extensively then, but one thing I brought with me from Berkeley was the excitement of really sharp dialogues and to some degree a practice of making across disciplines and areas. I spent a lot of time with the neurolinguistics community there, for example. I think I was keen to keep that level of engagement, excitement and sharpness, and HUMlab was an opportunity to do such work. My early work with HUMlab I did together with Torbjörn Johansson, who started it, but left soon.

Actually, I think some of the inspiration came along the way. We tend to think of infrastructure as finished, which is of course not the case, and something like HUMlab took 10+ years for me and my team to get together (not finished, but a major milestone, which is also when I decided I wanted to do other things). Remember too that we built two physical labs on two sites as well as an extensive institutional, digital and technological infrastructure. People who came through the lab influenced it greatly. Our postdoctoral program was instrumental in this way and also the digital art fellows that were part of that program. It is about people and conceptual-material grounding.

One important early inspiration, however, was the ACTlab at UT Austin. Torbjörn Johansson had seen ACTlab earlier I think; Sandy Stone and Samantha Krukowski also visited Umeå and I went to see the ACTlab shortly afterwards in 2001. I still look at those photos sometimes. What impressed me was the actual space, the operation and also the fact that there was an idea about how the intellectual, artistic, performative and the material-technological came together partly expressed in Sandy’s piece “On Being Trans, and Under the Radar: Tales from the ACTlab”. One key component that I took with me (and which was already part of my thinking) was the central, large table. In HUMlab those tables often turned out as seminar-like tables (used for all kinds of work though), but I recently advised a US initiative about a new lab and mentioned the rough surface of the ACTlab table then – a workshop kind of engagement. Things like that matter. HUMlab was not an art space/studio in the same way as the ACTlab, but there were clear correspondences. I think another early inspiration (again through Torbjörn) – which also demonstrates that lab building is about ideas – was the Santa Fé Institute. Although I went there once, I do not think the space itself influenced us but rather some of their ideas and key thinkers. Torbjörn was also inspired by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory in Chicago (and co-founder Dan Sandin came to visit us). When I became the director of HUMlab I took all of that with me, but I also had a particular interest in articulating and building on a strong intellectual-material engagement, and actively resisting some established models (technological and institutional). Over the years, we had lots of visitors, and also I visited environments all over the world.

In terms of technological infrastructure, one particular interest of mine is screens and screen scapes and I think these parts of HUMlab’s infrastructure were a reaction to CAVE-like environments, where you are surrounded by what is given to you and expected to be immersed. The screenscape in HUMlab-2 (an expanded area of the lab built in 2008) was in fact in some ways the opposite to a CAVE – many separated screens around, peripherally placed (allowing for the central table), and edges and frames were important etc. It was also about interrogating things like attention, orientation, perspectives, multiplexitivty and context. I also think HUMlab was a reaction to standardized lab spaces at the time. I had worked with some computer labs at the School of Humanities and we had also struggled to find adequate spaces and platforms to do early projects such as the Virtual Wedding Project. Torbjörn and I both thought it was important to have accessible, multi-functional spaces that could accommodate unplanned meetings and creative, non-controlled work, and that also had the best technology (not necessarily off the shelf) available. We wanted to have a friendly space with a great team, where (as I say in Big Digital Humanities) curatorship and empowerment were important strategies. I also have a strong personal interest in architecture, lamps, rugs and other things that co-developed with HUMlab (to the degree that I had one of the designer lamps in the lab – a Louis Poulsen Collage 600 in pink – at home too, which was somewhat uncomfortable – you do not want too much overlap).

Much of the early work was based on my and others’ interest in creating a meeting place for the humanities, culture and information technology. We wanted key intellectual discussions and technological explorations (small and large) to happen in the lab, and we wanted some of the best people of the world to be around for some of those discussions – often physically, but we also experimented consistently with different types of remote participation. This shaped the design of the lab and here an important source of inspiration was progressive humanities center-like institutions (although I did not know about them when I started at HUMlab, I now think of them as related infrastructures). I also worked very closely with architects and interior decorators from early on – this was one way I learned that I cared about the small details as well as the larger context of humanities labs. I started to write up material-intellectual sketches from the very beginning as a document I could use together with experts and stakeholders in building processes, and this is a practice I have continued to develop over the years. Such work must build on extensive conversations with people inside and outside the operation and it must consider goals, visions, challenges and material opportunities while having a clear direction.

Emerson: What do you think characterizes a unique humanities infrastructure or lab space, one that distinguishes itself from science, technology or engineering labs? Given your answer above, it sounds like in your experience humanities labs have the potential to explore a flexible design space that facilitates or is even response to many different kinds of interactions and modes of academic exploration – is this right?

Svensson: Yes, in my mind it is important to encourage different modes of engagement, epistemic traditions, experiments and cross-overs. This is likely what distinguishes a humanities-at-large lab or infrastructure from more specific kinds of infrastructure – let’s say an environmental archaeology lab, an echo-free room for auditory-linguistic analysis or an eye-tracking lab, all of which are or can be humanistic infrastructures but they are more specific in terms of their epistemic and interactional scope. I think an argument can be made for more large-scale humanistic infrastructure because it allows us to “package” different kinds of practices into a whole, thereby making them easier to “sell” given the current infrastructural regime and also creating points of intersections and engagement that would not otherwise exist.

That said, there are numerous things we need to be cautious about as we imagine and build humanistic infrastructure. We need to be careful we are not too exclusionary by over-emphasizing the uniqueness of the humanities and its associated infrastructures. But, that said, since academic infrastructure is so steeped in science and engineering, we also need to be careful we do not end up producing weak humanistic infrastructure as a shadow of STEM rather than actually imagining what humanistic infrastructure can be. There are humanistic templates, of course, and memory institutions are often and rightly mentioned in this context; but we do not want to create infrastructure that is uncritically modelled on what we think such institutions are and have been. Rather, we need to think about what we would like the humanities to be in the future as well as what we would like our institutions to be.

An example of a humanistic infrastructure that is worth thinking more about is the humanities center. This is an infrastructure with a 50+ year history (with several layers and historicities of privilege) and a configuration that is fairly unique to the humanities, although there is an affinity between humanities centers and centers of advanced study and other similar institutions. There is a great deal of variation among humanities centers, but the best ones are important places for grounded and sustained intellectual exchange and humanistic thinking and making. The traditional model of humanities centers comes with many predispositions (the single scholar in their secluded office working on their monograph and having communal, obligatory lunches etc.), but there is also room for change and development here. Infrastructure need not be static.

The unique character of humanistic infrastructure has to be connected to what we mean by the humanities and what the humanities can be in the future. If we believe in an agentive, intellectual and collaborative humanities (as I do), we have to build infrastructure to accommodate such work, engagement and thinking. Another unique aspect of humanities infrastructure is the way in which it can embody a deeply intertwined critical and creative/constructive engagement. We can be critical of our own infrastructure as we imagine, build and use it, and criticality can be built into the fabric of the infrastructure so that it serves as a kind of epistemic machinery. However, this is not typically a humanistic strength. We need to practice being critical of our own infrastructure, not just infrastructure elsewhere, and let that criticality shape how we build infrastructure as well as penetrate our work and institutions. Here is a simple, very mundane example: someone told me about an institution that was reallocating office spaces; faculty were guaranteed offices with windows while staff were not. Why should this be? We talk a lot about privilege and power, but we are often less keen to negotiate and reconfigure our own privileges.

Emerson: I completely agree with your closing point above about privilege and power – humanists, in particular, are often so concerned with their relatively marginalized position in their home institutions that they forget how much privilege they themselves may still bring to bear on a daily basis. On that note, how did you negotiate race, class, gender inequities and power dynamics while you were at HUMlab? And/or, how did you shape some of the lab programs and policies so that the lab didn’t reproduce the usual hierarchies associated with lab culture?

Svensson: This is a very important question. From the very start, HUMlab was conceived as an open meeting place, which did not include and exclude people based on discipline or status within the university (whether students, faculty or staff). Also, while there was an application system for people interested in having full 24 hour-access and server capacity and prospective full users had to give a rationale as to why they wanted to be part of the lab, acceptance was very liberal and there was no need to have a predefined task or even a clearly expressed interest. Occasionally we received applications from people who said they needed a place to do their regular word processing and we simply asked them to look more carefully at the HUMlab website and reapply. Everyone else was accepted. It was my job as director to read applications/registrations and I also tried to provide personal feedback whenever possible or just pick up on new users who had interesting ideas or projects. In terms of power, I think our emphasis on welcoming students and on not distinguishing between different kinds of people at the university created a unique place within the university. Also, many of the early projects were learning and student based (including some of my own work on virtual environments in language education, which was ‘constructivist’).

I saw quite clearly how having a large, accessible working space has the potential to challenge traditional hierarchies. As another example, teachers are often used to being in control of the learning situation behind a closed door (or a closed online learning environment); but when they came to HUMlab for classes they found themselves in an environment where other faculty, staff and students from other programs were there at the same time working on different things or just hanging out. The space and infrastructure were configured to accommodate such work. This may not be a particularly big challenge to traditional structures, but (many) such challenges or changes can certainly contribute to increasing awareness of some of the power structures embedded into our everyday lives and everyday infrastructure.

One key strength of HUMlab, in my mind, is that the lab as a meeting place was a sincere expression of our commitment to openness. It took me a bit of time early on to realize how powerful an idea this was (coming out of a disciplinary/departmental context), and once I embraced it I never doubted it. There is immense power in creating conditions for both doing work and engaging in conversations outside your own discipline, practice or group. These conditions do not just materialize because a platform has been created for it, but rather the creation of a genuine meeting place takes a lot of work as you have to build networks (and not just any networks, but networks that align with that mission), inspire and empower people to engage in different ways. It also takes continuous learning and the willingness to change. You build a culture together. In an environment like HUMlab you find a broad range of people, motivations and personalities, but there are more general qualities that I find important in this context including generosity, curiosity, sharpness and a willingness to learn and change. And always, the people working in the lab – whether staff or faculty – must be equally committed to making the meeting place happen. I also believe there has to be what might be called “productive tension” – you want people who are different, have different backgrounds, experiences and points of views, and part of the energy in a shared environment like HUMlab comes from those tensions. Tension in this sense is not a negative property, but it is very important that the environment as a whole both accommodates tension and is an informal and welcoming place for having those discussions and shared activities.

Critically Making the Internet of Things, 2010.

The meeting place also clearly extended beyond the university. Anyone could be in the lab and user registration was not limited to university students and employees. It is true there was some difficulty in providing full access for non-university people – we needed to talk to facilities management to issue card-based access etc., but it normally worked out relatively smoothly. However, once again, seeing yourself as an open meeting place does not necessarily make it so. It is perfectly possible to think of yourself as open, progressive and inviting, and still in fact be fairly closed in practice. To work against this possibility, we built HUMlab around individuals who wanted to be in the space, attend events and do work with us, and around structural collaborations with organizations outside the university. Activities and programming were an important tool for initiating collaborations and for supporting an ongoing dialogue. For example, we did quite a few events on “cultural industries”. I remember one workshop with CEOs, artists, scholars and others, where one of the artists said the she found the commercial framing of the discussion “off putting”, but for us, this somewhat unusual grouping of workshop participants was an opportunity for what we hoped was a productive tension.It is always about reaching beyond aggressive confrontation, but also not shying away from constructive tension and being willing to change. We built trust among different stakeholders, which made this work easier. At the same time, we did not collaborate with everyone, and I can see now how our broad networks by most standards were also limited and how the threshold is often higher than you would like to think. This was a matter of resources, funding and other factors, but also a consequence of being situated at a well-funded university.

Again, it is possible to resist hierarchies simply by choosing different kinds of people, genders and levels of seniority to participate in events. Even if I typically did much of the moderation and curatorship on such occasions, I almost always brought in wide range of speakers and participants – from technologists and experts to students and faculty. However, after having spent a semester with the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center and having had an opportunity to (continue to) learn from Cathy Davidson, I now think I should perhaps have given up more of my own time. For example, Cathy and her leadership colleague Katina Rogers do a wonderful job in giving over responsibility for introducing and hosting events to graduate student fellows. This is not just a question of handing over responsibility but also of being involved in a supportive process (offering to look at notes, sharing experiences with the other fellows, talking about how things went after the event etc.).

We were fortunate in that we were a creative and energetic environment and we were able to channel that energy for guests. All this was possible because we were privileged, of course. We had strong support from the university, funding agencies and many others, and had been successful in competing for external grants. We built trust. We also delivered, but basically we had a situation which is rare in academia, I think, where we had a license to explore and take risks. Taking that responsibility and having integrity was an important part of my role, and in retrospect, I can also see how we challenged established structures in the process. We could do things that many others could not, which was also part of the success. I think I was not fully aware at the time of the level of privilege we had in this sense or how important it was.

Emerson: Can you give us an example of how you tried to extend this idea of the open meeting place, especially one that challenges power and privilege, to collaborations you created between HUMlab and the private sector or just the world outside of the lab?

Svensson: Early on we started working with the cultural organization Kulturverket in Umeå, which has a somewhat similar position as HUMlab but within the municipality. They are interested in children’s stories and developing young peoples’ imaginations while working with professional cultural workers. The first large-scale collaboration between Kulturverket and HUMlab was a blog opera performed at the Norrlandsoperan in Umeå. This turned into a long-standing structural collaboration involving shared employees, space as we worked together on numerous projects. One gain (among many) for HUMlab was that Kulturverket had a direct connection to Umeå schools, and we ended up having many school children working on various projects over the years. I remember occasions when we had high-profile research delegations visit at the same time as these children were working on video projects alongside an archaeology group that was having a meeting in one of the inner spaces of the lab. There is much power to such occasions. In some ways, HUMlab and Kulturverket occupied similar institutional positions within our respective organizations and connecting these two nodes proved to be very advantageous as it was a way for HUMlab to reach out beyond the academic setting. Later, when we opened a second lab on the Umeå Arts Campus, these early collaborations proved very useful. And in fact the new lab HUMlab-X is even more clearly positioned between the university and the world outside.

Another example of a successful collaboration involved a couple of our early postdoctoral fellows who helped run our first summer making games camp. One of our art fellows , Stefanie Wuschitz, worked with some of the others in the lab and started Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory – a feminist hackerspace in 2008. Stefanie was also instrumental in organizing the Eclectic Tech Carnival in 2009, which was an important event for the lab and to which we dedicated resources and support. The Eclectic Tech Carnival was conceived as a women-only event, which was the source of internal discussions in the lab. I initially resisted because I felt that HUMlab was an open meeting place for everyone and should not exclude genders. I remember one occasion when Stefanie was having a skype meeting with one of the international organizers; I think I just walked by and they called me into the conversation. They explained to me why they wanted a women-only event including their experiences from “mixed” tech events and workshops. They shifted my thinking about this issue and I understood the need for only allowing women, although we also agreed not to close the lab to anyone wanting to do other work there while the event was going on. There will be many dialogues and negotiations like this in a shared space if you allow them, and if you are willing to learn, you can learn a lot about other people and yourself.

Stefanie Wuschitz’s work is an example of gender-inflected work, both in terms of practice and theory, that was undertaken in the lab during my tenure as director. Employees were also split fairly evenly between men and women, but there were structural differences. We had more female researchers and most employed technologists were men. Since HUMlab was a very event-heavy space and I organized many of those events, it was also my responsibility to make sure we were largely gender balanced in our selections. If I look at a series of large events we did from 2010 to 2014 (one per year) and I look at invited speakers the numbers are 57 women and 58 men. I do not have statistics for age, but we were always keen to invite early-career scholars. One of the first large events I organized in HUMlab had a student as one of the two keynote speakers. I have often tried to give less space to keynotes and more to early-career scholars, at times having had to negotiate with funding agencies to reallocate time. Part of these negotiations can also involve discouraging non-keynote speakers from commenting at a keynote and instead using them to contribute to a theme together with the keynote. Another example of a small change I made is that I stopped introducing people with bios and instead I typically introduced them with just their name and affiliation. This does not remove power structures, but at least it contributes to not reinforcing them.

Emerson: And I imagine you’ve been rethinking the role of privilege from the time you were at Umeå to your move to New York and now Los Angeles?

Svensson: Umeå university is a privileged institution in a country which funds higher education well and which has a decent welfare system and social infrastructure (but certainly not without challenges and structural inequalities). The school of humanities and arts is fairly homogeneous (it is very white and Swedish) even though there is probably a little bit more diversity now than in previous years. HUMlab itself was also predominantly white (and it still is) although it was also significantly more international than most other humanities units at the time. This international orientation (that was nurtured through postdoctoral programs, international events, European projects, networks etc.) was largely – but not only – Anglo-American and European in its orientation because this is where much of our work and networks were based. There are reasons for this (including capacity and funding structures), but it is also the result of a kind of blindness I think (I am not blaming anyone really, but if there is anyone to blame it would be me). For me personally, having spent a year at the Graduate Center in New York City, being part of a community where issues of race and power were central, and now being based in Los Angeles, I feel I have learnt a great deal, including how much my networks and network capacity are embedded in my circle of connections and context. Being in other places and intellectual milieus (albeit in the US) – in itself a reflection of privilege – has given me different perspectives, but again, as I have tried to emphasize in the above, changing things (including yourself) takes concerted effort, commitment and the willingness to listen to others. Also, as I have tried to stress, I believe that change often comes through many small tweaks to established systems and challenges to different kinds of regimes. This does not preclude more drastic moves, but in my work on infrastructure I have realized how we sometimes over-emphasize the large-scale instead of attending to micro reconfigurations that can lead to a larger impact. When I started at UCLA, two commitments I had was to think about how to support multi-vocal conversation (over presentation) for academic events and how to organize events with a strong commitment to intersectional issues and in particular (but not only) race (these two commitments overlap really). I am also really interested in thinking about and enacting an “active humanities” and rethinking humanistic infrastructure and infrastructure thinking, which is where many values and our own inability to engage critically with our own conditions are embedded.

Emerson: I am eager to hear more about how your thinking about humanistic infrastructure has changed, especially since you finished writing Big Digital Humanities. But, before we move into the present and the future, I would like to know more about what exactly you think made HUMlab a lab? What did the designation “lab” give you that some other organizing principle (if not a center or an institute, perhaps a workshop or studio) did not?

Svensson: I think ‘lab’ was a useful designation in that it signaled something different than, say, a center, but the main strength was probably in the combination of ‘HUM’ and ‘lab’. The capital HUM was important as it indicated the central (but not given/stable) role of the Humanities. ‘Lab’ pointed to experimental and other practices often assumed to live outside the humanities. There was a basic tension in the name, which was useful and correlates with the idea of HUMlab as meeting place for humanities, culture and technology. I also think that ‘lab’ pointed to the fact that we were based in a physical site with experimental infrastructure (although we were also involved in all kinds of distributed environments).

An anecdote: I always used HUMlab (written that way) and all our materials too for a long time, but with increased informational control exercised by the university there was a push to follow the rule which is capital first letter: Humlab. I resisted this name change because I thought that the ‘HUM’ carried meaning. When we had just expanded to HUMlab-X and the new Arts Campus I actually asked the vice chancellor and the administrative head of the university for an exception to the rule so that we could have signage with “HUMlab-X”, which was approved. But over time – unless you fight consistently (and this is a small thing admittedly) – it is difficult to resist such pushes /regulations /standardizations and I think HUMlab is now Humlab.

In terms of infrastructure thinking I also think that ‘lab’ can be more useful than ‘studio’ or ‘workshop’ which seem to signal smaller pieces. HUMlab was conceived as an infrastructure/operation at scale with many different parts and ‘lab’ made it easier to make the case for an extensive, heterogeneous, infrastructure-rich environment. I think that ‘Institute’ could have been a natural next step – this is something I suggested towards the end of my tenure as director. ‘Institute” allows for more possibilities intellectually and organizationally (or rather perhaps, institutionalizes some of the space we had created through HUMlab), and also at that time (around 2014-2015), there many more HUMlab-like entities around.

Roger Mähler and Johan Von Boer in charge of the display system software (and hardware) developed for HUMlab for an event in HUMlab-X – part of the HUMlab team (2014).

Emerson: You touched a little on the larger communities you engaged with while you were Director of HUMlab – including CEOs, artists, and even schoolchildren. But what about the larger infrastructure of the surrounding area of HUMlab – if I remember correctly, it’s nestled in the basement of another building on campus. How does the larger environment or even the larger, surrounding ecology affect the nature of HUMlab?

Svensson: We ended up having several labs, but the original one is in a subterranean space that used to be an exam hall back when I took undergraduate exams. It is below the university library at the one end of the social sciences building very close to the humanities building connected via an underground passageway (an important feature for facilitating connectivity in the north of Sweden). At first, I would sometimes be apologetic about our basement space when presenting the lab, telling visitors we were on the university building plan to be relocated sometime in the future; but I gradually come to realize how perfect the location and the space was. For a meeting place that extended outside the humanities the location was ideal in that it was fairly neutral (borrowing also the neutrality from the main library above) and it was close enough to the humanities building that there was proximity and connection.

Let me also say something about HUMlab-X before moving on the other part of your question. We started building this lab in 2010, opening it in 2012 as part of the Umeå Arts Campus on a site about a 10-15 minute walk from the main campus. HUMlab-X was, and still is, between the main campus and the city center. While it was a substantial challenge to go from one lab on one campus to two labs on two campuses, my strategy was to suggest there was common conceptual foundation (the meeting place), a local environment and infrastructure that partly shaped each lab, and an important function in connecting the two campuses (especially since we were the only academic institution on both campuses). I think this worked out well, but it was still a challenge to distribute resources and activate networks on the new site. HUMlab-X was meant to be and became a more public-facing part of the lab. Not that the original lab did not have that function, but it was simply easier to get to the Arts Campus and the lab is connected via glass to the main part of the campus with a view of the river. It is situated in an amazing location in between the Institute of Design, the School of Architecture, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Bildmuseet. While it took time to connect strongly with the ‘new’ community on the Arts Campus, I think connectivity with local cultural and civic organizations took off fairly quickly. In short, it matters where you are located, and the fact that the Bildmuseet is a public institution helped us too. You can learn a lot from institutions that are public in a way that university institutions will probably never be, and our proximity made their publicness partly ours.

Umeå Universitet, UMU. HUMlab, 2014.

I would also like to respond to the second part of your question about ecology. One important finding is a fairly recent realization that the local (in terms of space, light conditions, location, geology, history, culture, tensions etc.) plays a more important role than we sometimes think. I think we always drew on some of that and certainly, among other things, the particularities of Umeå contributed to making HUMlab a sought-after place for international scholars and others to visit. Of course, visitors were also attracted to the lab and our work but the the place and its history and its light (or lack of light – it was no accident that we started to do annual December events at the height of darkness) also played an important role. And through working with local organizations, being part of regional networks (including the creative industries located in the north of Sweden), receiving visiting delegations, and doing various projects such as the Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004 project we were certainly part of the city and the region and its history and future.

At the same time, I think it is easy to become too international. I learned over the years that doing fully international events at Umeå without incorporating many local participants was not necessarily a productive strategy. With a place and almost tangible energy like HUMlab I do not think we could ever have displaced ourselves – the lab and the people resonated through the activities – but, again, there is certainly a risk of being too international. I have thought of this in my work on infrastructure and advanced institutes – large-scale, templated infrastructure is often seen as global and uninflected by the local and advanced institutes often seem to stress excellence and isolation to the degree that the local gets deemphasized (they can seem like spaceships). I also think that we (under my tenure) could have been even more engaged in everyday affairs and structural problems in our city/region and had a more active voice in addressing environmental, social and racial challenges.

CUNY Graduate Center conference 2016 “Unflattening and Enacting Visualization”. Martha Hollander in conversation with Nina McCurdy (in/on the IPad) at the event – from the Q&A in the session “Experienced Reflections”. Photo credit: The Futures Initiative, The Graduate Center, CUNY and Patrik Svensson.

Emerson: Finally, would you give us a sense of how you’re starting to rethink humanistic infrastructure and infrastructure thinking? How has your thinking on both changed, perhaps particularly since you’ve been living in New York and L.A.?

Svensson: I think some of that is in the book, for which infrastructure plays an important role and some of it was written/edited when I was in NYC. In any case, it is also true that I have spent quite a bit of time recently considering and reconsidering infrastructure thinking and making. I am just about to finish a large article on “humanistic infrastructure” which has been an exciting and challenging project. Going through lots of infrastructure material I was again struck about the lack of critical, epistemic, social and cultural inflection. Infrastructure sometimes seems like a place of its own outside these matters despite being fundamental to our work and lives. Strangely enough, discussions of humanities infrastructure often do not have much humanities in it. From a digital humanities perspective: Given that digital humanities more strongly has incorporated critical categories into its work (although this is very obviously ongoing work) over the last five years or so, it is interesting to see that infrastructure still seems to retain its status as a refuge, the last place to be touched by the humanities/the human in some ways. This is not just about the digital humanities, but about academic and to some degree civic infrastructure.

How has my thinking changed/developed and how has my thinking about infrastructure changed?

1. I more clearly see the value of small changes. If they are based on a clear concept or a consistent set of ideas and values, small changes can make a real difference. They can also be more meaningful to talk about as people are more likely to see an opportunity for change. A very simple example I mentioned earlier is that I essentially stopped introducing people with bios at academic events. This does not take away existing hierarchies, but at the same time it does not reinforce them (compare the long bio of a senior scholar and the briefer one of a graduate student). It all has to work together, be part of some kind of heart beat, not in a singular way, but in complex, meaningful ways. Small changes also relate to an increased understanding of mine of the importance of small-scale infrastructure. Alex Gil talks about minimal computing, which is one example of this (see Gil and Ortega), but I am also thinking of Natalie Jerijimenko’s ingenuous environmental health clinic work, where she often comes up against ‘heavy’ infrastructure regimes (the infrastructure itself, bidding procedures, the educational systems that produce the people that are in control of infrastructure work, expectations of scale/size). Natalie’s work has been tremendously influential for me. We can see the same in relation to academic thinking and work on infrastructure. The default size is big and the texture shiny. HUMlab drew on the tension between small and large infrastructure and to build a strong conceptual foundation that drove the lab, but it is a fine balance. Sometimes large infrastructures can be intimidating and they can obstruct us from thinking about small (meaningful, experimental, flexible, movable, short-term, interventionistic) infrastructures. In digital humanities and digitization efforts, I think scale (and the idea of large scale) has often been an obstacle – especially when all major efforts are spent on digitizing and then providing a standard access model. There also needs to be a space for infrastructure with much stronger, specific and clear epistemic, social, and human stakes.

2. I also learned from being based in NYC and LA too that one of things I love doing – curating events – had been less linked to the infrastructure we built in Umeå than I thought. HUMlab was a fantastic environment for doing those events and gave me plenty of experimental opportunity, but I also found that the curatorial practices I developed there and to some degree elsewhere were less linked to the space and technology than I had thought. When I started to do large-scale events at the Graduate Center and at UCLA I think it pushed me to experiment in different ways. The pair talks I started to do was a useful concept, and to some degree it drew on technological setups. A pair talk is an experimental short-format that allows two people to engage around a topic; the focus is not presentation but dialogue. Slide presentations are not included which changes the dynamics but, instead, display infrastructure can be used to change the single slide view to better match the structural composition of the session. Especially at UCLA with the oblong screen set up in their Visualization Portal, we can juxtapose each member of the pair with one medium (image, film or whatever) in a useful way. In short, the pair talks privilege conversational time and this is something I have tried to push hard in the UCLA DH Humanities series and essentially in everything I do now. I’ve found it makes such a big difference to take away the presentational framing that comes with slideware and slides, and it actually encourages experimentation and other modalities too. For example, at a recent event on data driven research in the humanities at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sverker Sörlin, who does fascinating work in so many areas, ended up talking about ice and glaciers as data and had an old documentary film running in the background while making the point (among other things) about how environmental data is local if we go back in time (and we could see it being “harvested” in the film, but also in the broader context of its making). I spent a lot of time finding the best possible space at the Royal Institute – a large studio space in the Architecture Building, which contributed to making the event work out really well, but again it is just one factor among many. I am not only interested in “event infrastructure”, of course, but some of these experiences will certainly feed into future institutional building for me.

3. My time at the CUNY Graduate Center and at UCLA has given me a more expansive view of infrastructure. This is not necessarily all that exciting, but part of my own personal growth. It has been meaningful for me to work in these environments with people who are strongly socially engaged at a time which is challenging in so many ways. This expansiveness in my thinking goes beyond an attention to infrastructure, of course, but it has also brought together my interests in academic and civic infrastructure, and made me think differently about what infrastructure can be and how it is inflected, and how we (humanists/humans) can be part of real-world change. My own practice has often been about changing academic infrastructure/contexts, but my focus has shifted somewhat. People like Naomi Murakawa (at Princeton), April Hathcock (at NYU) and Natalie Jeremijenko (also at NYU) have been very influential for my thinking as well as Christopher Lee (at UCLA) and Jasmine Nyende (an LA-based artist). I am also so lucky to continue to work with people such as David Theo Goldberg, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner, Cathy Davidson, Shannon Mattern, Matt Ratto, Erica Robles-Anderson, Tara McPherson, Élika Ortega, Pelle Snickars and many others. Infrastructure thinking is about people, which is also a reflection of how empty of people infrastructure speak, visuals and thinking can be just they are often empty of critical and epistemic inflection and of heart.. I have developed a much more interventionistic and activist sense of infrastructure, and I have moved from mainly being interested in scholarly and epistemic infrastructure to also civic, societal and environmental infrastructure. I have a lot of learning to do, of course, but this is where I want to go. I also feel there is a strong need to think much more about what humanistic infrastructure is and can be. Get me right: I am interested in both types of infrastructure, which makes sense because they overlap and co-exist. Humanistic intervention and action outside the academy is critical, and critiquing and changing our own institutions is part of this larger challenge. I have started to work on some of these issues in a more focused manner with Natalie Jeremijenko, Matt Ratto and others.

4. Another development is increased and broader interest in infrastructure in general over the last couple of years or so. Infrastructure is more mainstream in several ways. In countries like Sweden (and in the European context) this is certainly true on a policy level and in terms of how an infrastructural regime is filtering down through the system. Academic work is also increasingly structured around the idea of infrastructure. Academically, infrastructure has been a key interest for fields such as STS for a long time, and we see more pronounced interest there and also more interest from other fields. Christian Sandvig says that infrastructure is the new network and there is certainly something to that. While I do not think infrastructure studies within STS seeks to change STS as a field in major ways, scholars such as Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski and Alan Liu – among others – see infrastructure as a vehicle to reimagine their own disciplines and fields (media studies, the humanities, digital humanities). In the digital humanities, we see more interest in infrastructure too. I am thinking, for example, of Deb Verhoeven, Tanya Clement, Laura Mandell, Susan Brown and Jacque Wernimont’s 2016 Digital Humanities conference panel on “Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities.” I really appreciate their interventionist, critical and active engagement with infrastructure; they write, “Successful infrastructure has the capacity to transform the world in which we already (co‑)exist. Digital humanities infrastructure can open up new visions of the world in which we live, and invite contemplation of the different ways in which we might live, and work, in it.” I am also inspired by the work by Roopika Risam, Catherine D’Ignazio, Jarrett Drake, Matt Ratto and Jenny Sundén. Some other recent work includes David M. Berry’s and Anders Fagerjord’s new book, Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age, in which humanistic engagement with infrastructure is largely framed as a critical enterprise; they write, “digital humanists will need to develop their powers of critique regarding sites of power, which includes the instantiation of digital technologies, platforms and infrastructures” (143). I am very interested in making this into a more active and interventionist engagement. I am also intrigued with James Smithies’ book, The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern, that focuses on systems analysis and infrastructure – although I remain somewhat skeptical of the utilitarian framing, especially when he writes about the resistance in the humanities to “technical work and the epistemological positions that enable it” and claims that positivist and utilitarian approaches to research are “to some degree and with necessary modifications” – “precisely what is required to successfully design and build digital products” [58]). I think there is a great deal of potential at this intersection and this is also where much work needs to be done, but there is a risk to construe technological work as essentially positivist and to suggest that the humanities need to design and build around such an (assumed) epistemological position. I would like us (humanists) to extend our repertoire – epistemic, expressive, interventionist, cultural, social, political – in order to be part of shaping both our own and civic infrastructure. Most of the time not by ourselves, but with others, and both critically and creatively-constructively at the same time, always.

Emerson: Thank you so much, Patrik, for taking the time to talk with me about the trajectory of your thinking on humanities labs and infrastructure, from your early years at HUMlab to your time now at UCLA. It’s been a real pleasure!

It is called MEDEA LAB MALMÖ, and it is located in Malmö, Sweden, as part of Malmö University. It started in 2009. It grew out of the work conducted within the School of Arts and Communication, which started in 1998 when Malmö University was inaugurated.

2) What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

We deal with societal challenges through experiments and interventions. The focus is on what we term collaborative media, [as well as] on design, and public engagement. We combine critical and theoretical work with design and arts based practices.

3) Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?

It is primarily a research lab. About 30 researchers from Malmö University are involved in the work. Researchers come from fields such as Media and Communication Studies, Media Technology, Interaction Design, Design Theory, Computer Science, Comparative Literature and Art History. The work is carried out in collaboration with students and with researchers from other universities, and with people from outside academia belonging to public sector organizations, civil society organizations, the culture sector, and the creative industries.

“Living Archives”: opening the process of archiving so that it embraces contemporary practices associated with open data, social networking, mobile media, storytelling, gaming, and performance.

In addition to research, there is an outreach part of Medea. We have by now arranged more than 40 public lectures in our Medea Talks series, and more than 20 podcasts in our Medea Vox series. Speakers include Dick Hebdige, Lucy Suchman, Nick Montfort, Joanna Zylinska, Jay Bolter and Susan Schuppli.

4) What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

As well as the above mentioned lecture and podcast series, we produce academic books, articles and conference proceedings (by now more than 100 publications), symposia and art installations. Recent work includes the books Collaborative Media (Löwgren and Reimer, 2013) and Making Futures (Ehn, Nilsson and Topgaard, eds, 2014), both published by The MIT Press, the symposium The New Human, 2016, produced in collaboration with The Modern Museum Malmö, the symposium Executions: Conversations on Code, Politics & Practice, 2016, produced in collaboration with PhD Students Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Eric Snodgrass, and art installation World Brain, 2015, produced in collaboration with artists and researchers Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, and stage designer Amanda Wickman. The fanzine-style magazine Prototyping Futures from 2012 gives a nice overview over the kinds of collaborative projects we had carried out up until then.

Introduction to our “World Brain” art installation.

5) Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

We used to have a designated space, but since last year, we move between spaces, depending on our specific needs at specific times. There are pros and cons [associated] with this. There is obviously a point in having a designated space as a physical meeting space, but it is also expensive and may not always function optimally for the things one wants to do. Not having a designated space within the university also adds to the likelihood of conducting events and experiments outside the university setting, which suits and interests us.

“From Soil to Structure”: Reframing the city’s gardens, soil and concrete as alternative sources of open data through artistic interventions, workshops and public performances.

6) What sorts of support does the lab receive?

The lab gets base funding from The Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University. In addition to that, over the years funding has primarily come from Swedish research funders such as The Swedish Research Council and Knowledge Foundation, and from EU.

7) What are your major theoretical touchstones?

We take our points of departure on the one hand in the American pragmatism tradition of John Dewey and its continuation in the works of Donald Schön, on the other hand in the Scandinavian participatory design tradition. [We are also influenced by] Bauhaus.

8) What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

It would be a bit boring to say that our two books on The MIT press are the most significant accomplishments, even though academically they obviously are the most significant. But I would also like to point to the more tangible and material accomplishments of our work. Examples [include] our participation in the setting up of the now permanent maker space STPLN; working with film director Hanna Sköld in making her movie Nasty Old People into the first Swedish movie with a Creative Commons licence and the first movie ever to be distributed via the Pirate Bay; [and our] participation in the making of Malmö City Symphony, a collaborative documentary/arts film based on footage gathered by Malmö citizens which was then remixed by VJs [and performed] together with musicians in a live performance.

Hackathon workshop in the maker space STPLN.

9) Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

In general, we will continue with the kind of work we have done the last couple of years, while obviously trying to sharpen and refine it. We have a number of international partners and we would like to deepen the collaborations we have with them. One direction our work has taken is towards what may be called collaborative future-making. We are presently part of a network at Malmö University seeking long-term funding for a research program. In relation to the work carried out at Medea thus far, this network constitutes an academic broadening, bringing academics from fields such as social work, educational sciences, and political science into the Medea community.

We decided to explicitly call our environment a lab due to the experimental character of the work we do. It is experimental in the sense of conducting work where the outcome is not predetermined, and where the participants bring with them quite different kinds of experiences and get to work with people they are not accustomed to working with. Using the term ‘lab’ also indicates the material aspect of what we do. It is not a maker space or a living lab, but the combination of theory and practice [in our process] is crucial.

Our lab is called La Camera Ottica. It is part of the Department of Humanities and the Cultural Heritage – University of Udine. It is located in Gorizia (Italy), a small town on the border between Italy and Slovenia. Our director is Prof. Cosetta Saba and Lisa Parolo is the head of the “video section” while I’m currently the head of the “film section.”

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

We are specialized in two main fields. Firstly, we focus on the preservation of small-gauge films (mainly 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm and Super8): this means that we work mostly on amateur films and home movies (more broadly, on the local/regional film heritage) and on experimental films. Secondly, throughout the years we developed specific skills regarding the preservation of analog video (from the open-reel formats to U-matic, for instance): in these cases, we deal with video-artworks, performance art, etc.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?

The lab is mainly used by our researchers in order to have a solid “material” ground to work on when we talk about film history, video-art history, or media history projects. Of course, we also use the lab for teaching purposes: we have two courses and a workshop on preservation practices that take advantage of the practice-oriented trainings that the lab can offer. Moreover, we encourage students to apply for an internship in our lab – more specifically, students from our MA classes – the International Master in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies (IMACS).

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

The knowledge we produce is often channelled through essays, books, and documents in which we describe the protocols we have developed throughout the years. These protocols regard technical repairs and digitization for small-gauge films and analog videos. Moreover, we elaborated a protocol for the digitization of 35mm films through a photographic scanner (the so-called “Neri protocol”), which we have disseminated during conference presentations and essays.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

Yes, we have a designated space which is a six-room space: the back-office, the digital archiving room (we use LTO tapes), the technical repair room, the digitization room (for small-gauge films), the digital restoration room and the video section. As you can see, every room refers to a specific task.

What sorts of support does the lab receive?

As a part of a university department, we receive support from University of Udine. That being stated, our annual budget is mainly (self-)financed through external sources (preservation/digitization projects we develop in collaboration with our partners and customers, and so on). Furthermore, the lab represents an invaluable asset when our department or research group applies for European or Italian programs: of course, that is another way in which we can receive more funding.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

First of all, our research group has always had strong interconnections with the so-called “School of Bologna” (Nicola Mazzanti, Gian Luca Farinelli, Michele Canosa, Leonardo Quaresima, etc.), which, throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s, represented a touchstone for film preservation/restoration and film philology. More specifically, we refer to Leonardo Quaresima, who funded the film and media studies research group here in Udine/Gorzia. Alongside Leonardo Quaresima, another key reference for us is Alberto Farassino, who taught “Film History” in Trieste.

Moreover, a relevant touchstone is (of course) the domain of Media Archaeology: we got in touch with it through the essays of Wanda Strauven and Thomas Elsaesser. Later on, we extended our research interests, studying the works of Siegfried Zielinski, Jussi Parikka, Erkki Huhtamo and Annie van den Oever/Andreas Fickers, and organising workshops for the “Media Archaeology” section of our annual “FilmForum” MAGIS Spring School.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

I could refer to some restoration projects we worked on in the last years: for instance, the Vincenzo Neri Collection project (a neurological film collection of the early 20th Century) or several Italian video artworks of the Seventies (ASAC-Biennale and Palazzo dei Diamanti [Ferrara] collections, and so on). Apart from that, in my opinion, our major accomplishments regard the protocol we developed for small-gauge film (see, for instance, Gianni Caproni film collection) and for analog video restoration.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

Our goal for the next 3-5 years is to hybridize in a deeper fashion the epistemic tools and instruments we have developed as well as those coming from media-archaeological studies and expertise. More specifically, we would like to build a media-archaeology lab using the old “analog” technologies we have recovered.

What makes your lab a lab?

First of all, I think it is the infrastructure itself: we have all the material tools and instruments a small lab should have. Secondly, it is the expertise of the people that are working in it – most of all, our technician Gianandrea Sasso, who is one of the most skilled technicians in this field. Thanks to him (and his assistant Mary Comin) we are able to collaborate with several European and Italian institutions – mainly film and video archives, other film and video labs, etc.

In regards to the students, we can offer them a practice-centred lab experience, which is, in my opinion, something unique for the Italian university community.

Our lab is called Bilkent Media Archeology Lab. It is located at the Fine Arts, Design and Architecture Faculty of Ihsan Doğramacı Bilkent University in Bilkent, Ankara.

The lab is one of the newest extensions of the Department of Communication and Design’s studios and production facilities called BITS (Bilkent Iletişim ve Tasarım Studuyosu or in English: Bilkent Communication and Design Studio). “BITS” was setup in 1999. Today the studio facilitates two sound stages, a Foley studio (which is under construction), a stop-motion studio, post-production facilities and a multi-camera production setup at the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra Hall.

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

Right now the lab is collecting obsolete analogue and digital devices from all over the university, which means rescuing various video tape players and recorders, as well as older computer models and audio-visual devices from being trashed.

In the centre of the lab is a conversion or transfer setup to convert various video formats from analogue sources to digital file formats.

Most of the equipment reflects the department’s 20 years of history since it foundation in 1998, and the development of low cost media production tools.
The Bilkent Media Archeology Lab also collected and still collects various tape-based archives like Bilkent’s own PASO Student Film Festival Archive, the Bilkent Turkish Cinema Archive by Dr. Ahmet Gürata, the FADA Animation Archive, the Bilkent University Institutional History Archive, etc.

Undergraduate and graduate students volunteer in their spare time to check and register tapes of various formats from 8mm video, to Low-Band U-Matic, Beta, VHS, and Beta SP, and convert/transfer them to a series of digital formats with the goal of making them public and accessible again through servers hosted by BCC, the computer centre of Bilkent University.

Some students of the department have already started to curate screenings of Turkish student short films from the early 2000s on campus.

The MFA graduate program in Media & Design, also run by the department, uses also older computer platforms collected in the lab to review and exhibit obsolete CD-ROMs in an exhibition series on campus at the FADA gallery called “On Display”.

As an example, Chris Marker’s milestone CD-ROM work “Immemory” is available for interested students to study on a working system. Other interactive CD-ROMs and older games are also becoming part of the collection.

In Spring 2017, Boran Aksoy and Melih Aydınat, two MFA students, used an analogue video mixer and older consumer cameras from the lab to integrate a video surveillance system into the theatre production of “Madman and the Nun” by Bilkent’s Department of Performing Arts, directed by Daniel Irizarry. The system was used to do a live mix during the performance, which was recorded and projected outside of the theatre space, and later converted to a remote digital system, which allowed the user to choose camera positions while viewing the recorded performance.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?

Students of the MFA in Media & Design are the ones who use the lab most right now. Boran Aksoy and Melih Aydınat are working on their thesis projects with tools and equipment provided by the lab. They do most of their research in the lab.

The students of the graduate studio in the MFA are using the tools for experimenting with analogue and digital audio-visual technology for their design and artistic practices.

A group of undergraduate students is volunteering to digitize old VHS and Beta tapes to make them available again. They will curate screenings in the Fall 2018.

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

The lab officially was launched with a workshop and symposium in October 2017: “PLAY/PAUSE, FF/REWIND: Shared Practices & Archaeologies of Media”. To celebrate the launch of our Media Archeology Lab we invited students and scholars from the various universities of Ankara to “Play/Pause, FF/Rewind,” and were excited to host Wolfgang Ernst, Annie van den Oever and Jussi Parikka. The program at this first symposium by and for the lab was concluded with a roundtable discussion on October 6th at Erimtan Arkeoloji ve Sanat Müzesi.

In 2018 I will start a little booklet series on objects from the lab called “Objects of Interest,” together with Alev Değim and the students of our graduate programs. Of course, the title is influenced by the TV series “Person of Interest”. Each of the planed booklets will investigate a specific object from the lab.

As a simple example, the first number investigates Peter Greenaway’s claim, in September 1983, that cinema was murdered by the remote control, and is scheduled to be available in September 2018 as open access publication.

In “Objects of Interests: Objects of Control” I am developing a workshop model or format, where participants relate to box opening, identification, registration and documentation of technical objects obsolete and/or in use from remote controllers, switch panels to surveillance systems. Participants will create representations, visual documents, photos, graphics of found patterns and invisible resemblances of structures, object-cities, technical environments for exhibition, or personal prints to take home. The intention will be to re-use and re-purpose the objects at hand … a main focus of our media lab.

Influential here is Wolfgang Ernst’s Fundus and the attached or linked “Signal Lab” – a constellation, which looks very much suitable, and similar for us.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

We have a designated space, which is already getting too small, so we are using the graduate studio for experimental setups and meetings, discussions, and screenings, etc. Keys are handed from one person to the other, and right now, the structure is very informal, just coordinated by the department, its instructors and graduate students.

What sorts of support does the lab receive?

Except the faculty’s own budget, we don’t have any other support. The overall spending for the lab has not been more than 1,000 Euro for buying storage boxes, or building shelves (not-including the workshop, symposium and scholarly visits).

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

Our major theoretical touchstones or influences are naturally the writings of Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka, Lori Emerson’s work, but also the Video Vortex Network, the video art and experimental activities around GISAM at Middle East Technical University in the late 1990s, which I was part of since 1994, the activities around Kör-Otonomedya, my friends Ulus Baker, Aras Özgün, Hakan Topal in New York, Angela Melitopoulus and Maurizio Lazzarato’s Video Philosophy.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

I guess our symposium!

But also people have started to ask our students about devices and tapes they find. Our own students have begun watching the videos in the lab, and reading manuals. News of the lab is spreading through word-of-mouth.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

There are at least one or two more years in front of us to sort out what we have in stock, to determine our potential, and to create an identity for our lab environment. We want to be open, flexible, adaptable and up-dateable towards various approaches and interests in the faculty as well as with the university’s general interest in the field of design and technology.
It is our aim to establish the lab with its various units, locations, and facilities not just as a media lab but as an experimental playground for research and education in technological mediation to bridge between science and engineering, and art and design.

Concretely, this means we wish to host interdisciplinary research projects in the sciences, humanities and the arts, and to participate in related international projects, platforms and networks.

What makes your lab a lab?

What makes our lab a lab is simple: we have a shared environment with shared practices related to a diverse range of media technologies from analogue to digital.

Shared practices lead to experiments, and a diverse range of learning methods through practices of box opening, functional tests and identifications, encoding and decoding, transferring and so on. The interesting part is that the environment is combined with a theory and practice project-based approach.

It’s not simply an archive, and it’s not simply a production facility. It is a space where you are able to combine things in different ways, where mistakes are allowed, and where the result is creative, and therefore has the potential to allow freedom in development and practice.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?

The space is primarily meant for collaboration between researchers, artists and programmers. The exception is the creative computing summer school (10 students took part in the first edition.) The lab is also a place for selected classes, on digital genres or digital culture, for example. Lectures are organized on [a] regular basis, and one of the lab’s aims is [to create a] community of scientists, students, artists.

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

The lab primarily produces digital works that can function in a few fields of the demoscene: electronic literature, video games and media art. Our research focuses on, among other things, local phenomena in the digital media field [such as] strategies for cloning platforms in Central and Eastern Europe (especially the 8-bit computer ZX Spectrum), as well as digital genres and their specific features in Central and Eastern Europe.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

The lab is financed by the program of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education’s “National Programme for the Development of Humanities” for the years 2016-19. Our hardware and the lab’s library [is] also supported by the programme Ars Docendi, financed by the President of the Jagiellonian University, as well as Austria-based The Patterns Lectures project.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

One of the most important approaches [we apply] is Platform Studies, [which takes] into account the role of material platforms in the digital media field. This methodology is very helpful in the area of creative works done in the lab, as well as [for] research projects that focus on studying original approaches to platform, especially cloning the original platforms and researching the demoscene or digital genres. [Our] research can be also seen in the context of the Decentering Digital Media trend present in today’s digital media.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

The lab’s most significant accomplishments are probably the following: our pioneering research on the demoscene; research on the ZX Spectrum platform and its clones using the Platform Studies approach; the selected works produced by the lab, e.g. “Platform game Mysterious Dimensions” by the demosceners Yerzmyey and Hellboj for the ZX Spectrum 128K & ZX Spectrum 48K, AGD, Assembler platforms; or the iPeiper application by Jan K. Argasiński and Piotr Marecki, created thanks to the iBeacon technology in the Java SQLite programming languages presented at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Portugal 2017.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

JH: We’re called Access Space, and we are located in the city centre of Sheffield, UK

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

JH: We have three strands to our work: arts, education & technology. Usually our work is a mix of two or all three. We also have a maker space. Our main focus is maker skills education, creative technology workshops to help artists develop new practice mediating technology into the arts, work with the wider community in Sheffield (including those at risk of exclusion such as people with autistic spectrum disorders), partnering with universities for research projects, and helping entrepreneurs develop small scale prototypes.

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars, the wider community?

JH: We have a wide range of people using the space for different purposes. Hypothetically anyone can use Access Space, but it is mainly for creative people to learn new skills and develop ideas. Currently we welcome the public in on Wednesdays for Repair Days where we help them to intervene in product life cycle and give their possessions longer life (keeping them out of land fill).

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

JH: We’re not great at producing publications! Probably because we’re too busy. We have produced two books: Grow Your Own Media Lab (how to create a media lab from recycled and donated computers) and CommonSense (writing and art about the commons). We occasionally give presentations, but now our main focus is social media.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

JH: We have had the same space in the city centre for 17 years, and in 2011 we expanded it to create our maker space, Refab Space. We also now have two more small spaces on the other side of the city centre for exhibitions, meetings and offices. As far as staffing structures go, we try to be as non-hierarchical as we can.

What sorts of support does the lab receive?

JH: Access Space is an independent UK charity. We apply for funding every year to various bodies including the Arts Council England and various small trusts and charitable foundations. We also have had success partnering with universities on research.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

JH: Open source, knowledge sharing, re-use/recycling, diverse community participation, the value of the arts in creating a more empowered society, the importance of the permeable boundaries around technology and the arts.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

JH: When we closed temporarily for a period of transformation in 2015, we had been the longest continuous internet inclusion project in the UK. We have remained inclusive for all the years we have been open.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

JH: We are currently planning to move to a larger space as audiences to our events have often been at capacity, and we want to expand our maker space to include a welding shop.

What makes your lab a lab?

JH: The creative and enquiring activities people carry out here.

]]>An Interview with Marcel O’Gorman of Critical Media Labhttps://whatisamedialab.com/2017/10/16/an-interview-with-marcel-ogorman-of-critical-media-lab/
Mon, 16 Oct 2017 13:49:36 +0000http://whatisamedialab.com/?p=55719/06/2017
What is your lab called and where is it?

MO: The lab is called Critical Media Lab. It is located in the downtown core of Kitchener, Ontario, amidst a burgeoning tech hub with multiple tech incubators and a Google headquarters. The lab is off the UWaterloo campus. Kitchener and Waterloo are technically one urban area, but for political reasons, each city has kept its distinct name. Waterloo is traditionally a university town. Kitchener is a grittier place rooted in a history of manufacturing.

What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

MO: In the lab, we create digital projects that reflect on “the impacts of technology on society and the human condition.” That is not entirely accurate, however, since we study more than mere “impacts” (e.g., the human is always-already technical) and more than “humans.” Still, this is what we tell the public. We create projects that are somewhere between digital art and hardware hacking experiments: sensor-based environments, public video projection, small gadgetry, software, wearables. Often, we will take an off-the-shelf kit or product and hack it to make an argument. In general, we create projects that embody specific concepts from media theory and the philosophy of technology. I have called this Applied Media Theory in my published work (see Necromedia form 2015 or “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys” from 2010). I often use the term “objects-to-think-with.”

Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for seminars?

MO: The lab is used for graduate seminars, research by grad students and faculty, workshops, public exhibitions, and public speaker events. Students have their own cubicle/workbench space in the lab, so they are the main occupants. We have relationships with community arts and culture groups, including a local makerspace called Kwartzlab. The lab hosts regular exhibitions, and so it is also a gallery of sorts.

What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce and how is it circulated?

MO: The lab produces objects that get shown in exhibitions (some we own, some are elsewhere) and discussed at academic conferences. We also publish about our work in academic journals, the press, and in social media.

Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

MO: Space has always been key because I wanted to be off campus. This has caused many problems, including the problem of moving four times. The lab started in my office in 2007, then moved to a glorious building across from City Hall in Downtown Kitchener in 2008. The building was a bank for several years, and before that it was the Public Utilities Commission building, which first brought electricity to the city. Unfortunately, rent was too high for our Faculty of Arts to manage. In 2009, we moved into a space at the local museum of ideas called THEMUSEUM, but that only lasted for one year due to security issues that limited our access to the space. In 2010 I signed a lease with the City of Kitchener for an unused retail space with a highly visible storefront on the main street. We were there for three years until the building was condemned. I decided to stop signing shady lease agreements, and worked with the university to find a more sustainable location. We ended up at what the city calls the Creative Hub, which is in an old mail sorting facility. We share space with several start-ups and some arts groups.

The problem with moving so many times is that each move destabilizes the culture that was developed in a space. It is difficult to get things to “stick” when you keep shaking the petri dish.What sort of support does the lab receive?

MO: The lab receives funding from the university for space and a part-time lab technician (10 hours/week). Beyond that, we rely on government grants that are under my name and linked to my own research. The lab has been central to over $1 million in competitive grants that I have received from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

What are your major theoretical touchstones?

MO: The lab’s name was inspired by the MIT Media Lab. The goal was to create a media lab that steered clear of corporate interests and did not revel in an uncareful and uncritical celebration of technical progress. Today, I would say the lab is inspired in part by the Frankfurt School and in part by posthumanism. But that could change if you ask me tomorrow.

What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

MO: The lab was central to the production of my book Necromedia, and it is discussed throughout this book. But accomplishments include the many successful grant applications mentioned above, which have funded the projects of students and collaborators. I could wax philosophical about this and say that the lab’s greatest accomplishment is a series of micro-accomplishments in the shape of English majors learning how to make philosophical hardware.

Maybe the greatest accomplishment is that the lab has managed to survive for a decade amidst constant cuts to funding in our Faculty of Arts. Part of this story is that the lab prides itself as being techno-critical at an institution that prides itself as being Canada’s most innovative university. We are in the belly of the beast, so to speak, and we have yet to be kicked out.

Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

MO: We have just received a grant to update our makerspace (new 3D printers, laser cutter, soldering stations, parts for wearable computing, IoT, sensor-based applications, etc.). Essentially, we will be focusing on fast prototyping for some new projects that involve people from Environment, Psychology, and Computer science. The lab will work to put more students into tech incubators, where they will focus on what might be called “social innovation” projects. The idea is to have projects move outside of the classroom and lab so they can go public, which will help us engage the tech community more intensely.

What makes your lab a lab?

MO: To me, a lab is a place for experimentation and invention, some of it ludic and some of it guided by very specific objectives. A lab involves not just the production of research, but also of culture. A strong lab culture can be very generative; it can have a great impact on the surrounding community and expand well beyond that to infiltrate culture more broadly speaking.

“We plan to maintain our breadth across performance/music media arts, history, everyday life and mediated life, critical theory—but/and we also want to push our critical edge. So much work in DH hasn’t been critical in orientation, and we do many of us, in different ways, come out of that tradition. So we’re intending to keep asking questions about gender, power and digital technology, automated epistemologies—and their supposedly ‘neutrality’, and to integrate those into our more material work more deeply.” – Caroline Bassett and Sally-Jane Norman on the future goals of the Sussex Humanities Lab, UK

NT: What is your lab called and where is it?

We are the Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL), based at the University of Sussex, in the Downs outside the City of Brighton, UK. We are a research centre/programme and we span a series of Schools of Study—with a strong base in media and film (School of Media, Film and Music), and in HAHP (History, Art History and Philosophy) also in Education schools and in informatics and engineering (E&I) (computer scientists). ‘We’ are (i) the programme (SHL), (ii) the named and supported members of the team—academics at all levels, technical support people, project manager, admin (iii) we have a physical ‘lab’ space – we call this the ‘Digital Humanities Lab’, It is at the heart of our work, although its not always where we do things…

NT: What sorts of projects and activities form the core of your work? Is there a specific temporal or technological focus for your lab?

We are initially funded for four years—so this means our tempo needs to be pretty rapid. We are tasked with providing enough evidence of some form of sustainability at the end of that time, to become a permanent research centre within the University—in some shape or other. We don’t necessarily think we should simply seek to ‘do the same again’, at the end of our project time. We have a bunch of official KPIs (performance indicators) and the plan we bid for the funds with also sets out a series of targets (for engagement, impact—look up the UK meaning of that term…, and for grant capture). Those are rather official though. I would expand all that to say that we want to:
*Generate new forms of thinking and new forms of research—both in the humanities in general (where digital transformation produces new possibilities and opens new perspectives) and in relation to the computational as the subject of inquiry. That’s the big goal really. To do that we need to:
Intervene into the fields that together constitute digital humanities (lower case), by which we mean both traditional DH areas and also cultural, media, digital media, code studies, areas which have been exploring digital transformation in different ways for an equally long time. We think DH can become broader, more diverse, more multi-mediated—and that it needs to become more critical. We recognize the tension between critical theories of DH that can just produce abstraction, and the need to engage materially with new possibilities and new methodologies arising through big data, various forms of automation, and other new computational technologies. We think it can be productive—and that it’s fine if it sometimes produce antagonism. Actually in our lab we argue all the time. We are superb at arguing … including about our name: we deliberately adopted the “Sussex Humanities Lab”—rather than “Digital Humanities Lab”—name, precisely to demarcate ourselves from technical servicing- oriented DH bodies that have spread over the past couple of decades. The frequent mobilisation of big digital infrastructure funds as a rationale for developing (otherwise poorly supported) humanities research has resulted in a lot of projects where the (funded) tail wags the (confused) dog. We did not want to be identifiable with these countless, very similar organisations that have jumped onto the DH/ “cyberinfrastructure” bandwagon (e-science in the UK), simply to
develop new kinds of insufficiently conceptualised and critiqued demonstrations of technical prowess and gimmicky computational affordances doomed to swift obsolescence. We want the dog to wag its own tail – happily and excitedly, and in ways that can energise and contagiously enthuse others.
We want to make a difference in public discourse and debate in various fields—around public heritage and public culture and performance, around social justice and (digital) media, around digital transformation and/in relation to broader cultural forms and politics (how do fake news and big data connect? Could you map that using sonic programming?) So we want to talk to people way beyond ‘strict academia’.

To make any of these kinds of interventions possible we need to:

•Win public funding (and also expand our funding sources because these sources arent’ very inter-disciplinary and are contracting). We need this because it is the way to get support for research that pushes traditional arts and humanities boundaries/limits—larger teams, bigger calls on equipment, more complex work strands, combining performance, multimedia, with data analysis, critical theory, access, source, issues.

•We also need to work to change the institution we’re in—to make it better able to handle DH work—for instance by engaging with infra-structure questions (around asset-handling, networks, etc.) and open source/publishing/beyond text questions, and by engaging with curriculum issues—we’re not teaching but we’re generating short learning courses, open days, open events—and we’re just undertaking some survey work to look at the connected work on DH across our campus; the point is to become the expert knowers inside the University so we can influence new courses/programmes.

•Institutional change also means shaking up traditionally managed territories and modes of operation to facilitate if not catalyse new forms of collaboration. Sussex was founded as a pioneering university whose interdisciplinary energies could/ would (and did) broker whole new fields of scholarship by convening then unlikely/ inhabitual bedfellows—for example, engaging human geography and economics to underpin holistic development studies, or cognitive science and philosophy to boost new approaches to artificial intelligence and artificial life in computing. To build on the radical rethinking of interactions across disciplines and sectors that was Sussex’s initial hallmark now means leaping over some of the siloes and disciplinary autarchies that have since become quite fiercely instated. These are moreover consolidated by territorialised university accountability practices (e.g. across schools, departments), and internal competition for revenue streams, that disincentivise the kinds of collaboration we were set up to promote. Part of the battle consists of making constant, stubborn arguments for added value and returns on investment that are not immediate. We’re caught up between a sunset-clause rock and a long-term-seeding-rationale hard place.

NT: Who uses the lab? Is it a space for students, for researchers, for artists, for seminars?

The SHL team—which is currently five—and a half—full professors and a project manager (we are the Core leadership—the half are the computing profs we pull in ex officio and ditto the Library), 4 fixed term lecturers (something like associate profs in US-speak but not tenured), 4 post-doctoral researchers/lab researchers, a Library sponsored post-doc, five funded doctoral students—all of whom are brilliant (check out their projects on our website), and two lab
technicians. None of the full professors are full time on the SHL project – we all have bits of our selves attached to the Lab—and have to teach etc. as well… the Team people teach but not that much, and the Lab technicians are part time, but dedicated to us!

The exception at the moment is that the lab is not used for timetabled teaching of UG (under- grad) students. The reason is that if we did that, we would stop being a research lab within a term and become a teaching room. This is about pressure on space really. We run loads of events that UG students (and everybody else are welcome to, and some events that are designated for them. Just not week in/week out teaching.

Given the penury of space and readily available research expertise that is our broader university context (i.e. there are masses of fantastic researchers, but most are tightly tied into their own programmes), we have to position ourselves carefully. If we are to motivate and inspire colleagues to pursue the new kinds of research we stand for, we must facilitate their efforts as far as possible—hosting and co-organising their research events, mentoring their funding applications, etc. But we must also avoid becoming a mere “service”, a “go-to” lab for churning out other people’s bids and ensuring other people’s logistics (the trap so often evident in more traditional DH centres and labs). This means ensuring that our we’re not jeopardising our own, internal lab-driven initiatives, which remain our priority, yet are encouraging and helping others whose research initiatives may be of direct interest and value to the lab. We hold all kinds of open days alongside our regular events (seminars, workshops, etc) and try to keep our profile, our ethos, and our raison d’être as transparent as possible, to avoid the—terribly easy— slippages in perception that might undermine our work.

NT: What sorts of knowledge does the lab produce (writing, demonstrations, patents etc.) and how is it circulated (e.g. conference papers, pamphlets, books, videos, social media)?

I guess we produce:
(words):
•Monographs
•Journal articles
•Chapters etc.
•Non-standard written outputs (for e.g. art projects, festival publications, think tank reports etc.)
•(live media/beyond text)
We also produce:
•Performances – and document them in various ways
•Installations
•Hacking/Making workshops
•Software—notably so far this is emerging in relation to work on music technology.

We circulate what we make/write/do—through standard academic routes; that’s conferences, symposium, seminars. Also by way of social media—blogs, tweets, Facebook—(although the later is contested somewhat because some of our team want to be fully open source).

Developments like a score-following software system for ensemble music making are circulated as part of their “natural” testing process, through activities with local schools and amateur orchestras, and with disaffected and socially troubled groups we access via local and regional councils. Similarly, hacking workshops involving young children demand other forms of circulation, where researchers from education and psychology engage directly with children, families, primary education providers etc. Lab members are regularly involved in Algoraves and all kinds of experimental performance events in venues that are definitely not “academic”.

Given the exciting diversity of our team, and the multiple skills and profiles of many of its members, we function as a network per se that has lively ramifications across a host of other more specialist networks (e.g. critical theory and media, museums and archives, participatory and inclusive design, performance technologies).

NT: Tell us about your infrastructure. Do you have a designated space and how does that work?

I’m not sure if this answers the question. But actually most of our ‘infra-structure’ is human— that’s to say we invested most of what we won, on bringing in our fixed term researchers in the right places across the university so we had the right specialisms to draw on.

Other that that:
Our funding let us establish a lab space—which is a small but adaptable performance, making, seminar, talk space. The kind of equipment in there includes excellent audio/sonic equipment, a good rig, screens etc.
There is much less ‘standard’ text-based DH equipment than might be expected. (scanners etc.) This is partly because all of our team are also in Schools and have bases and equipment there, and this includes e.g. informatics equipment (servers/workstations etc.) and Library/Archive facilities. We are aware of a tension between the two kinds of activities—‘traditional DH’ if you like and performance, media arts foci—essentially we want our one room to be full of equipment AND empty and re-purposable at the same time. We are working with portable/put-away-able hardware where at all possible. (e.g. 3D printers that can be moved around to various sites for use). We have very limited storage space so have to look carefully at what we host and how we can best keep memories of those activities, so they can feed into our broader identity and continue to shape our evolving trajectory. It’s a tricky trade-off: archiving and streaming lab activities is itself a constant lab project, not to say challenge. Being able to turn work spaces into an anarchic table tennis arena (we keep the ball alive, playing it off the walls, ceilings, and floor, as well as that boring rectangle called the table) is very important and therapeutic.

And we have a glorious outdoor space with wooden benches which makes us a highly coveted space for a good part of the (sunny) Brighton year. It’s great for evening drinks and general conversation. There is a small garden with some herbs, trees and shrubs, occasional rabbits, and the library cat may deign to visit.

NT: What sorts of support does the lab receive?

We won a £3m peer reviewed University Competition to establish the Centre. That’s key start- up funding. And we are supported by the grants we are winning. Currently we are running or about to run with four: a big BBC/oral history grant, two networks, a music tech grant, a surveillance grant. And some bits and pieces… The BBC one is important because its large scale and supports us expanding.

NT: What are your major theoretical touchstones?

Critical theory—Stiegler, and/as evolution out of Frankfurt, Latour, feminist theorists of technology—Haraway. Engagement with new materialisms. Media archeology/medium theory/software studies (German medium theory and beyond)—we many of us are also cultural theorists, with roots in material cultural studies— and are therefore always in tension with German medium theory.

In performance/media art terms: Claire Bishop arises a great deal these days.
Karen Barad and feminist writing on “intra-action” and performativity. Gilbert Simondon on individuation, Nigel Thrift on Politics and Affect. André Leroi-Gourhan on prosthetisation of memory. Margaret Morrison and Mary Morgan on modeling and mediation.

We share interests across the Lab on e.g. ‘standard’ DH scholarship—Hayles/Moretti/Liu— questions of digital publishing/Open Source etc.
We’re also interested in key thinking around digital everyday and childhood.
One way to see what we’re interested in would be to look at our publications lists. (I will get one over to you). It’s a hard question—because we come from a wide range of places…

NT: What would you say is the lab’s most significant accomplishment to date?

WE set ourselves up—over 21 people—and we meet and operate together, and argue and talk. We are a new space in the university. I guess in funding terms a big achievement is the big BBC oral history grant, but some of the best events/exchanges so far have been around networks—for instance on automation anxiety. And my personal favourite day in the lab was with a sawn-off cello, a modular synth, and a man turning an old LP player into a kind of serial orchestra.

Smaller grants have produced exciting events: an early career researcher carried off a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award he used to organise a major conference/ performance on “Designing Interfaces for Creativity”, where one of his keynotes was a CERN physicist talking about scientific infrastructure and creativity… We’ve collaborated on / contributed to a major international “Live Interfaces” conference hosted at Sussex, and mentor colleagues on large grants that involve high profile external workshops (e.g. at IRCAM – Paris, STEIM – Amsterdam). We try to ensure that SHL presence is sufficiently in evidence to consolidate our identity and networks, though our resources for communications purposes remain extremely limited.

NT: Could you briefly describe your plans for the lab over the next 3-5 years?

We plan to maintain our breadth across performance/music media arts, history, everyday life and mediated life, critical theory—but/and we also want to push our critical edge. So much work in DH hasn’t been critical in orientation, and we do many of us, in different ways, come out of that tradition. So we’re intending to keep asking questions about gender, power and digital technology, automated epistemologies—and their supposedly ‘neutrality’ (‘if it’s a computer it can’t be racist’ kind of arguments), and to integrate those into our more material work more deeply.

We want to become a sustainable/sustained programme unit at Sussex—but not in a way that fixes ‘what we do’—we’d like to be a travelling lab—in that we traverse the relevant areas to ask interesting questions.

NT: What makes your lab a lab?

Well we have a soldering iron….. Although it turned out it was illegal for a while (health and safety)! But the real reason is that we want to do things in the humanities that don’t fit in normal humanities places… that’s why we wanted to be ‘humanities lab’.

I would add that that being a lab and having a lab are very different things…
We needed the Lab—concept—and the promise of the Lab space—to get off the ground and to shape our project. That is we needed to argue to BE a lab to differentiate our project, to pull people around us who wanted to contribute, to get recognition of funding needs in.

We need to actually have a lab to: curate a space, to make a home for people whose office desks are all over a dispersed campus, to make a space to concentrate ideas/conflicts/events, and to develop and identity, to be a group, to have a flexible space to do things in.

We also use our lab to play table tennis in….. which is good for our souls and our mind-brain co-ordination…. We threaten to embark on some TT motion capture, but this hasn’t been done yet.

“…while the global digital humanities community is constantly defining and redefining itself, we embrace an inclusive understanding that respects and investigates the myriad of ways that digital methods and technology are opening an avenue to research, and the human experience.” – Meredith Martin, CDH Princeton

Meredith Martin: This is the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton’s second year with a physical location. We started last year officially, but before that, we were an initiative that I started with a number of faculty colleagues as well as colleagues from the University Library and from our Office of Information Technology. We began as a discussion group, bringing together faculty from across all divisions of campus — from computer science, from sociology, from all of the humanities departments. These discussions began in September of 2011. Over the course of the 2011-2012 school-year, we developed four focus groups after holding a a day-long meeting in January 2012. We decided collectively that we wanted to do some research on what Princeton could offer and was already offering, since we are so resource-rich. We wanted to investigate whether we needed to have a Center at all. The preliminary meetings in the fall of 2011 were primarily to talk about what other peer institutions had and what kind of possibilities there were to support digital work at Princeton. We talked about collaborative and interdisciplinary possibilities across campus. Then we thought about how we might develop a kind of white paper that we aimed to complete by the end of the spring term of 2012. We also started thinking about a mission statement for the initiative itself at that January meeting.

After our January meeting, we broke into those four focus groups that met separately over the course of the spring 2012. These were defined by the group as “teaching and research,” “infrastructure,” “funding,” and “programming.” Programming meant basically inviting people to campus to give talks, but also offering workshops Princeton wasn’t already offering. Infrastructure was tasked with thinking about what Research Computing, the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, the Library, etc., was already doing. At the end of that spring the four focus groups turned in a separate section of a vision statement to a steering committee that we had assembled. That vision statement was then put together by the steering committee over the course of the summer of 2012.
With the advice of what we called an “executive committee” including the Chief Information Officer, the Deputy Dean of the Faculty, the Executive Director of the Humanities Council, and the University Librarian we turned the vision statement into a document asking for a Center. This was their strong advice.
Over the course of the fall 2012 we revised the document and submitted it, and then I worked closely with the Provost over the course of that year, approved officially sometime in early 2013. In that approval process we were approved to hire an Associate Director, which is the first thing that we wanted so that it wasn’t completely grassroots, faculty run with all of us doing this volunteer work that was not recognized service.

Basically 2012/2013 was revising the proposal, and 2013/2014 was the year of the search for the Associate Director, and that was also the year that I was officially named the Faculty Director of the “Center”; however we didn’t yet have a physical Center. I spent most of that year (13/14) fundraising, and I raised half of the total operating budget with support from 25 different departments and divisions as a three-year commitment with a substantial amount of that support coming from Princeton’s Humanities Council. I took this broad-based campus support to the Provost’s Office and the new Provost (the former Provost had been named President) were very supportive when they saw the work we had done. The University Library took the Center for DH as an administrative home at the University and funded the search for the Associate Director, as well as helped us to become a fully-fledged academic unit (the first in the University Library). Being an academic unit rather than an administrative unit at Princeton means that we can have faculty teach, support research grants for graduate students and stuff like that. Jean Bauer was hired in the academic year in July of 2014, and 2014/2015 was her first full year, and now 2015/2016 is her second year.

We now have a temporary (they call it “swing”) space that we were given at the beginning of last year, Fall 2014. It’s in the former psychology department. Some of our offices are converted observation rooms that are more like small closets with one-way glass. We put some particleboard up so that they don’t look so horrible, but we have equipment, we have space, we have our stuff there. We’re in our official third year as a Center, but we didn’t have any physical space except the last two years so we really think of this as our second official year.Melissa M: This sounds so familiar to me — Humanities people coming to DH, not necessarily through tech, but through working together with a lot of library collaboration.

Meredith M: It wasn’t as much library collaboration as OIT at Princeton. Actually [we] didn’t have that many librarians involved other than librarians who were actively working in GIS (of which we have many) and one “Digital Initiatives Coordinator” hired by the library but not trained as a librarian. Since 2007, I have been working on my own digital project called the Princeton Prosody Archive that certainly led me to think, “what’s going on at Princeton? Why can’t Princeton help me instead of me having to go to all these other Universities?”

Melissa M: I’m curious in its inception, how you came to name the Center, how everyone agreed to call it a Digital Humanities Center? The class that I’m in has been talking a lot about people’s aversion to that term, some claim that it’s too ubiquitous and maybe be a buzzword that covers too much, compared to others who use it [here and here]. I tend to like that about it, and obviously CDH likes it as well. I’m curious how CDH conceives of the term “digital humanities.”

Meredith M: As we say on the website — it’s the first thing we say, “while the global digital humanities community is constantly defining and redefining itself, we embrace an inclusive understanding that respects and investigates the myriad of ways that digital methods and technology are opening an avenue to research, and the human experience.” We’ve never been only a humanities Center, and I think we chose the term because it’s what the administration recognized. People knew what it was, and I think anybody who works in digital humanities recognizes this inaccuracy. To me, it’s really the same thing as “English.” The English department doesn’t just teach English, but teaches Anglophone literature, Critical Theory, history of the book, etc. For us it’s a necessity so that people recognize us to some extent but it doesn’t necessarily mean that “digital” or “humanities” is all that we do. For instance, we advise as much about data cleaning as network analaysis, and we have many social scientists and computer scientists collaborating and working in the Center alongside humanists.

Everything does have to pertain to the human record, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the only funded avenue of humanities research. We try to address that in the second line of our statement on the first page of the website. We’re not ambivalent about it, but we understand that it’s constantly evolving and changing.

Melissa M: In being interdisciplinary and, in using that approach, can you describe any projects that come to mind, that can contextualize how that’s done at [the CDH]?

Meredith M: All of the projects are interdisciplinary. […] The ABC folks were using TEI and now their using visualizations, so there’s computer science involved. The Prosody Archive engages with the history of linguistics, obviously computer science if you’re think about how to code non-standard characters, history of the teaching of English, some pedagogical history, it’s not an archive of poetry, it’s the art of studying poetry, it’s also historical.

Melissa M: I was really interested in the ABC, the one dealing with children’s literature, and what was going on there.

Meredith M: What the students do in Children’s Literature is to think about how computers need to be taught how to read, just like children need to be taught how to read. The first iteration of the course presented a parallel between children’s literature in the ABC Books archive and thinking about text encoding, and its challenges, which becomes a theoretical problem for the students. Many students in the class completed an archival project where they selected a book and analyzed the morphology of the book. We also have them think through how they might code the book differently – for animals, colors, shapes, etc. There’s was lot of discussion about computer reading, and about reading in general, and about literacy, media literacy, computer literacy.

The class is supported by the Center, which means there is a graduate student who oversees the other graduate student instructors. At Princeton there is the Professor and then we have discussion groups, which Princeton calls “precepts.” There are 450 students currently enrolled in the spring 2016 Children’s Literature class. And each of those students will go to lecture twice a week, but then once a week they’ll go to their discussion group, and that will be a small group of no more than 12 students, taught by a graduate student. But one of those discussions will be taught by the professor.

In those discussion sections, the graduate students will give the students the option of doing a digital humanities project in lieu of a traditional paper. Not all of them have to do with text encoding this year. We have a head “assistant instructor” or AI, who coordinates the graduate student instructor and trains them in digital methodologies digital pedagogy, and in how to evaluate digital scholarship. Then there’s an ongoing course website where they’re continuing to build a database of all these ABC Books from the rare books collection, from the Cotsen children’s book library.

Melissa M: Oh wow. I didn’t realize the amount of pedagogy that went into that project. That’s great.

Meredith M: In the three years of the Center’s start we’ve had specific goals for each year. Last year we focused on intake for faculty research projects. This year we’re focusing on graduate student training and graduate student research, which is why we are training the assistant instructor and giving them tools to do digital pedagogy. We also employ graduate student project managers on every single one of our projects, so all graduate students who are project managers go through project management training. Some of the graduate students, of course, have to learn different technology depending upon the project. Next year we’re focusing on undergraduate curriculum.

Melissa M: That sounds wonderful. You’ve already talked a little bit about the physical space, so I’ll just jump halfway into that question. Are there current plans to, or what are the current plans for, updating the space, or changing the space in the future?

Meredith M: We move into the library’s physical space in 2017. Our main humanities’ library, Firestone, has been under renovation for the past 20 years, and we’re coming to the end of it — we’re at 70% completion. Luckily, they weren’t so complete that we could not squeeze in a Center for Digital Humanities inside the new library. We are not [yet] physically in the library, like I said, we’re in a temporary space that used to be occupied by the psychology department. In 2017, if everything goes well, we will move into our new space in the library. We’ve been involved in its design over the course of this year and even last year, meeting with architects and designers to consider our needs.
It will have office space for our developers and designer, the Associate Director, the Business Manager, the consultants, the post doc, all of that. Currently in our space we have the Associate Director, and basically all the staff is there, except for me because I have an office in the English department. You’re not allowed to have two offices at Princeton because space is at a premium. The Associate Director, Jean Bauer is there, the two post docs are there, Claude Willan and Joseph Yannielli. The six-year graduate student, Ben Sacks, is there sometimes; he shares an office. The project manager, Natasha Ermolaev is there, half of the time, and then our Digital Humanities Consultant from the library is also there half of the time. He has an office upstairs so he kind of
comes down when needed. We have another staff member who is a liaison for the Office of Teaching and Learning, but he’s in the McGraw Center, so he only comes over for meetings or if he’s working on a project.

I feel like I’m missing someone who is also there. I really can’t think of anyone else, there’s a lab space. We have a big space that we use for meetings but also for talks. We have large plug-in displays that we mostly use. We have white board walls that we use all the time. Each office had its own computer and stuff like that, and in the meeting room. It’s a nice space. It works for us.

Melissa M: That’s interesting; we’re having a similar problem. We don’t really have a digital humanities space, and we’re [the class I’m currently in] struggling to conceive what that space would look like, and what we would even put in it. So that helps a lot when thinking about who should be there, and what should be there. I guess the big topic that has been coming up nearly every week in my class, [are] the inequalities that can come with DH, or maybe are just always in our discipline, but we’re seeing them carried over into DH. I see that the CDH has an upcoming event on that very issue, “Building Race and Gender and Otherness in DH,” can you talk more about that event, or the center’s other efforts at inclusivity?

Meredith M: We’re in the process of hiring right now; we have three positions, actually four positions, well soon have five positions we’re hiring for. Just at the level of the job search, we are very careful and conscientious to advertise on lists that would reach nontraditional and minority candidates. We’re doing a lot of outreach. Both Jean and I are incredibly aware of the need to increase the visibility of diversity in DH. Our executive committee represents a number of different demographics and a number of different disciplines on campus, which is really important to us.

In terms of this year’s programming, Jean and I decided that we wanted to try to focus on having primarily women come to speak. We haven’t made a big deal out of this, but our three main speakers are Joanna Swafford, Julie Flanders, Natalie Houston coming in the spring, in addition to Meredith McGill who will be on campus teaching for us in the spring. We didn’t make any big fanfare about it, but we thought, “you know, that’s what we want to do.” That’s one under-the-radar way that we’re doing thinking about gender representation in the field. We’re really hoping that with some of these hires we can increase the visibility of diversity in our own staff. We have gender diversity, but we don’t have as much racial or ethnic diversity as we would like. We are hoping we can hire to represent the talent we know is out there.

Melissa M: That’s great. And in bringing graduate students in for the next generation, as far as students go, has it been difficult to get students to understand this type of work? Are the [new students] coming with tech experience? Or is that something that the CDH is offering to get them into — different parts of the tech world?

Meredith M: It really depends on the type of project. If you do a scan of the website you can see the kinds of workshops that we offer. We try to cover the basics of things like visualization, network analysis, GIS, TEI, things like that. We also have a number of higher-level projects that aren’t necessarily on our slate yet, that are in the process of being proposed for next year, that will have a large graduate student and undergraduate teams. A lot of the tech depends on the projects specific needs. For instance, the Mapping Expatriate Paris Project has trained quite a number of students in TEI, because it’s encoding these really interesting, and kind of wacky, library cards. All of the students who are working on that, including the project manager Jesse McCarthy, and the research staff, which are all four graduate students from the English department have all had to understand and learn what it means to make choices about TEI, and there wasn’t really any resistance to it. They just said, “Oh that’s what we need to do to work on this project, and this project is really cool.”
Now they’re all really good at it and can be deployed on other projects. The Phono-Post project has a lot of visualization, has a graduate assistant thinking with them about that, along with an undergraduate in Computer Science. The graduate student Natalie Berkman, and whose project is Digital Oulipo, has had the steepest learning curve. She had to teach herself Python, but it was part of what she wanted to do. She did some online courses, and we’re trying to hook her up with people who can provide some follow-up workshops. We’re really responding to what people need and not assuming everyone uses the same thing since the projects are so diverse.

Melissa M: That’s so great, I saw you have two TEI workshops coming up. I’m so jealous, they look great.

Meredith M: Part of our focus on TEI this term is also because Julia Flanders is so well-known in the field so we’re letting her do the second one. Clifford Wulfman, who is the DH Consultant and who is also the project lead for the Blue Mountain Project, has training and expertise in TEI so he taught the first workshop. There’s also a large team of graduate students from across the humanities departments, actually none from English on Blue Mountain, but they employ four metadata editors.

Melissa M: My last question extends to thinking about the profession and the trajectory that we’re on in academia. How you imagine DH work being assessed in the future? You mentioned earlier that all this work that was put into building the space wasn’t originally seen as work done as part of your professional time or service, but I think we can obviously see that is starting to change. I’m interested in how you see digital scholarship being assessed, and how you would hope for it to be assessed in the future?

Meredith M: In 2011, which is also when I started this initiative basically, I attended this NEH funded workshop about how to evaluate work in digital humanities and digital media. There was a report that group delivered to the MLA about evaluating DH work for tenure and promotion. I’ve always been interested in thinking about these higher-level tenure promotion issues, which is why for our project intake process we have the professors and graduate students to submit project proposals that undergo a very stringent peer- reviewed process by our Executive Committee, and then when they do get their projects accepted by the Center it’s not, “oh yeah we’ll do this for you,” it’s actually you pass through quite a large hurdle and develop a work-plan, a design review, a project charter, and a statement of sustainability. All of this documentation is on our website.

We based some of this on the NEH longer version to prepare our faculty to apply for external grants as well. We’re about to send out our call for projects, but definitely check back on the website. It shows how many steps people need to go through to get their project accepted because we can’t accept all of the projects. Then what we do is communicate with the chairs of all of the departments to give them an overview of what these procedures are so that when they receive a report at the end of the year from their faculty for promotional purposes, they will know that this isn’t just a kind of side project. This is a crucial part of their research that has gone through peer review, that has all this documentation, monthly reporting, benchmarking, and that this is a serious research project.

So that’s how we’re trying to do things at Princeton. Educating the chairs about how to evaluate this work and then educating the Dean of the Faculty so that the faculty and administration understands it’s a really big deal when the project gets accepted by the Center. We are not a service shop. We’re a research center. So if you have a project accepted, [it’s] basically like you got a grant. You are accepted into something that was very competitive.

Melissa M: That’s great, I’m definitely going to have to check back on that and share that with my class. We’ve been really interested in that issue of professionalism and how that is tied to under representation and inclusivity as well.

Meredith M: I think for the graduate students especially, because graduate students can have projects accepted as official Center projects also, it’s a really big deal; that means as a graduate student you basically beat out a faculty member, if their project better scoped and thought out. But that’s sort of one wonderful thing in terms of going out into the world and talking about your work – you had a project accepted — but it’s also wonderful that graduate students have to learn how to manage a project and integrate that project into their dissertation work. So there are a lot of other ways that they’re learning skills that could be an applicable alternative not only in academic careers, but in their own academic careers. Because all academics have to write grants.

Melissa M: That’s so wonderful. Thank you so much again for talking with me. I know your time is so valuable and you’re so busy. I really appreciate it.

Meredith M: It’s my pleasure, Melissa, and good luck with your class.

]]>An Interview With Sydney Shep of Wai-te-ata Press at Victoria University (Wellington, New Zealand)https://whatisamedialab.com/2017/05/21/elana-friedland-interviews-sydney-shep-of-wai-te-ata-press-victoria-university-wellington-new-zealand/
Sun, 21 May 2017 21:49:57 +0000http://whatisamedialab.com/?p=496Interview by Elana Friedland

EF: Hi.

SS: Hello.

EF: How are you?

SS: I’m good, thank you. I’ve put video on, as you can see, just so you can have a look at my space and have some fun. Lots of printing presses, lots of stuff, yeah.

EF: It’s also been a real pleasure to see your space through the videos that you have on the website too, so thank you.

SS: Well, that’s good, because we just had a new website with the responsive template launched last week, so really good timing.

EF: I noticed that and I was curious: what prompted the change to the new website?

SS: They had rolled out a responsive template all across the university, and I’m one of the smaller centers so I wasn’t included in the first tranche, and then they had some extra money so three of the research institutes and centers were asked to rethink their websites. So it’s transitioning into a different mode, but there’s a lot more, shall we say, things to play with, to make it a lot more user-friendly, and to profile a lot more images and that, so that’s a first step, but it will be a growing thing.

EF: Thank you for explaining that. And thank you too for taking the time out to talk to me about the press.

SS: Well, it’s sort of cool that you were here for a semester. When was that?

EF: Back in 2010. I took a survey course on New Zealand literature through the English department.

SS: Yeah. Who was your lecturer? Jane Stafford, or Mark Williams, or Lydia Wevers, or —

EF: I think they all took turns lecturing, because I remember having a rotating cast of lecturers in there.

SS: Great. Yeah. So, small world. So thank you so much for connecting with me, and yeah, it looks like this is a great project, and I love the way that Lori sort of framed the whole course, so it’s been a real inspiration for me to dig down a bit into that too.

EF: Awesome. I’m glad there’s been a value in this for you too.

SS: Oh, absolutely. We’re talking the same language, so I was really excited to see that not only she got her media archeology lab, but some of her inspirations are mine as well, so yeah, I’ll be interested to see how the class goes, and particularly with whatever creative work that you end up producing as a result of your, you know, intersections with all these worlds.

EF: To shift gears a bit, I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about the work that you do in your role as the director and the printer over at the press. Since it seems like you encompass a wide range of things in that role, how do you find the balance between the different aspects of your role?

SS: Yeah, it’s a bit of a juggling act, as you can imagine. I inherited the space, and the three pillars, which were the research, the teaching and learning, and the printing and publishing, were an important marker of what Wai-te-ata Press was all about.

So I retained all three of those, and in the world of accountability and administrivia, there’s a lot more to do in terms of the back end administration stuff as well. But it doesn’t mean that I can juggle all the balls all at the same time, it means that according to the rhythms of getting external funding for research projects, funding or commissions for printing work, and then the schedule of teaching through the year, it’s quite a flexible kind of space where, depending on what comes in the door and what’s on the menu at the moment, able to weave things in and out.

I’m a sole charge director, which means it’s just me, and I run my own budget center, so I’ve got a level of autonomy, because I’m not associated with the school or a department, but I am under the faculty of humanities and social science, so I do have a kind of academic affiliation, but it’s more a facility that is available to anyone in the university. So a lot of what I do is not only work within the existing spaces that I have, but also reach out to across the university and a lot of external engagement.

So in order to help execute all the stuff that I really want to do, that relies upon me getting funding, generally external funding that then I can hire research assistants. So that’s easiest when it comes to research projects. So at the moment I’ve got four research assistants working on my project on William Colenso and the Victorian Republic of Letters.

We also have something called Performance-Based — PBRF, Performance-Based Research Fund, which is a government-organized census of all individual and university research outputs that are then, every five to eight years, collated, and universities are then ranked, and based on their ranking they get a lump sum from the government, and based on then how the university wants to distribute that lump sum, it will go back to the schools or the departments, not necessarily to the person who has earned it through their research portfolio. So because I’m a single unit and because I’m the one doing the declared research in the census, they’ve made an accommodation for me, and I get the research fund money directed to Wai-te-ata Press, which means then I can hire publication assistants as well to help with that component of the operation.

And then with teaching, depending on what’s going on, that’s a revenue stream, so it gives me a bit of latitude to be able to cross subsidize other stuff that we do.

So I try and keep a healthy balance, because in a world of accountability, if you’re down below the line too often, people start to look askance at you, but I’ve got lots of support from the university which likes the idea that this is quite a unique facility for Australasia, that it does a lot of things, and that it has a lot of street cred and profile in the wider community. So as I say, it’s a bit of a balancing act, but it’s — and juggling the balls all the time for survival in a way, but you can never be complacent in one of these spaces, nor can you be complacent in academia anymore anyway.

EF: I’m interested in how much the community outside of the university is able to get involved with or does get involved with the goings-on of the lab. Is it easily accessible to the wider community, or are most of the folks who come in affiliated with the university?

SS: If we look at the research side of things, we do have partnering with externals, and that can be people who are working on specific research projects themselves, people who have expertise that we want to buy in or collaborate with.

So in digital humanities work, in digital history, which is where I locate our research platform, you can’t always times compared to that within the university, just because in New Zealand we’re about 10, 15 years behind the thrust through North America and Europe. So we don’t have the skill space and we don’t have the density of people who have graduated through DH programs, because we only really have one in the country, and it’s not a fully rendered one. So we’re always looking outwards for expertise. Always looking out beyond the subject area and the individual faculty to alliances within the university.

So the work that I am doing on exploring the materiality of culture, which is looking at 3D printing, that I’m doing in conjunction not only with our School of Design and Architecture, but with students in the School of Languages and Cultures, and a PhD student who’s in the nanotechnology space in the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences. So we’re really an interdisciplinary space, so trying to do that, you know, intra-university but inter-university as well.

In terms of the printing and publishing side of what we do, yes, often we will have commissions that come from external patrons, and some of those are writers who want to see their work published. Sometimes it’s — we’ve done a whole series with the diplomatic community, so embassies and high commissions commissioning work from us, and depending on whether we get access to what’s called Creative New Zealand, which is our arts funding agency, we can do additional projects.

So that’s really project-focused, and for anybody who’s external to the university community who wants to come in and do, in effect, studio hire, or commission us to do stuff, we’ve got quite a process we want to go through. Because being a university, education is our first mandate, and serving our local constituency is right up there, but we also want to cultivate relationships externally, but they can’t be for commercial gain for an external party. So what that means is if somebody wants to come in and do studio hire, that’s great, they have to pay for that service, and there are checks and balances in that because it’s — I’m the curator of the collection, and it’s a collection that is historic, so I have to balance what we call preservation through production, using the collection but not overusing it, and as soon as you start thinking in commercial terms, obviously that at times becomes totally overkill.

So what emerges is that for external communities, I at times will run workshops, and those can be run through our continuing education program. It can be ones that I’ve initiated myself, when there’s a density of people that I know that want to come in and learn the skills of letterpress. But it really is a question of scaffolding that initial training then into thinking about what those people then want to do. We’re not an open studio, A, because I can’t manage that given my time, and B, there’s — I would have to be on-site, and there’s a huge number of health and safety issues in our new legislation that would just preempt me from doing that, and would put the university at risk.

That being said, what we’re trying to open up is something we’re calling the PDFs, the Printer’s Devils Fridays, which will be, once we get sort of all the logistics sorted, an opportunity for the university community to drop in on Friday afternoons to learn a bit about type setting, working with the — I’ve got three students who have come through with me in coursework who are now either publication or research assistants, who themselves want to gain more experience and not skill. So then we work on a credit system that the hours that they put into doing activities for the press are then logged against personal projects that they’ve already agreed with me are suitable, are within scope, will use the equipment that we have, and the fonts that we have available.

So it’s an interesting balancing act between ensuring that we are seen to be open to the wider community, but not so open that everyone thinks they can just come in and do their stuff and leave their undisked type sitting for the next poor soul who’s got to, you know, find a letter that they can’t find because someone else has locked it up.

So unlike, say, the arm in New York or even some of the centers for the books — like in Wisconsin — or in Minnesota, rather, or New York, Guild of Book Workers, et cetera, the university is an interesting space to promote education, but it’s also not — it’s not a free space for the community, and that’s a difficult message to get across to people who assume that since universities are publicly funded, they’re basically a public resource, and that anything that you do is for free. So that could be consultation, they assume that’s all for free and coming in and using the facility, well, that’s for free, et cetera. But over the 50 odd years that Wai-te-ata Press has been in existence, the university has made a financial as well as intellectual commitment to this place, and so we have to, at the very banal level, we have to make our bottom line. So unless I can clear $250 a day, I can’t pay the rent that the university charges for the space that I have.

So that’s all then factored into if we want externals to come in, are they willing to either be a printer’s devil and start working to help the activities of the press and build up credits for personal projects that are noncommercial? Are they people who want to come in and learn a skill and then commission something for us to do?

So it’s a really interesting space to be in, and what we’re finding is that there are other letterpress opportunities in the city and throughout New Zealand, and they always say to me that you’re overpriced yourself, and I just try to explain that, well, we’ve got to make our bottom lines. If you want to train the people up to set a line of type and print it, fine. If they have that skill and they want to come to me and do something more with that, I’m open and flexible and we have our studio hire protocols that they could come in and work on those.

So yeah, I’ve been doing a business of investigation about what other book art studios, particularly in North America, how they deal with this question, whether they’re affiliated with colleges and universities, and it’s my understanding from my colleagues that most colleges and universities just serve their local community, as in their enrolled students and faculty, rather than looking outwards. So yeah, that’s a bit of a long answer for a short but meaty question.

EF: Thank you for that really in-depth look into the operations there. So you mentioned PDF, and I noticed with the updated website that there’s also the Literary Atlas app project that’s in the works. I’m curious about other future projects that you have in mind or directions that you’d like to see the press go?

SS: I guess because I came from an artist printmaking background and did a bookbinding apprenticeship in Scotland, and have a PhD in basically interdisciplinary cultural history, I don’t see the book arts studio in its most traditional form as producing, you know, the single section pamphlet, the tape sewn quarter bound book. I see there’s a lot more potential for letterpress, and I’m happy to leave it to other people to do those kinds of works, but for me, the challenge of keeping this space alive and keeping it relevant is demonstrating that there is a lot more you can do with these presses than printing.

When you start thinking in that regard then, you start thinking about what can I do with letterpress that helps to bridge the perceived gaps between orality and digital. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about physical and digital materiality. I’ve written a piece for the new Companion to Digital Humanities all about digital materiality that I think you might find interesting, because it’s building on a lot of stuff that is coming right out of Lori’s work, and it’s looking at some of the key players like Matt Kirschenbaum and Johanna Drucker, people like Jussi Parikka and the whole school that he’s affiliated with, with Wolfgang Ernst.

I teach letterpress like material science, and what I mean by that is it’s come out of my training where if you understand the materials that you’re working with intimately, then you know how to manipulate them. And irrespective of the technology of that manipulation, you can create wonderful things.

So most recently, because my research is working in the digital history area, and I’ll share with you a project that we’re working on now, but also because I’m really interested in printing 3D fonts and then analog printing those, you start thinking there’s major crossovers between the world of the digital and the world of the handmade. So we’ve coined “the digital handmade” as a mantra for what we do here at the press. Part of that is pragmatics. There is not enough time in this world to be able to–given everything else we’re doing–to hand set, hand print, and hand bind every single work that we do.

So as a pragmatic strategy, in the past what I’ve done is done hybrid editions with some digital and some letterpress. It might be a cover that’s gone digital because it’s a glorious multicolor wood block that we can’t afford to get the artist in here to do a limited edition for the covers, so we do a high-resolution, beautifully digitally printed work, and then the inside is all letterpress, set and printed, and it’s all hand bound, or vice versa, having the cover letterpress printed, and the interior digitally done. I guess our mantra is fine design is the key thing, and we feel we can do that in the digital handmade.

So we started out exploring what we could do with digitally scanning and then 3D printing from wood types, and one of the reasons to do that was I was inspired by a colleague who was generating new wood types out of medium-density fiberboard, and what we decided to do was, okay, Marty’s doing that, what can we do in the 3D printing space? So what we’ve got is — this is the MDF, or the medium-density fiberboard printed, that’s the classic wood type, as is this down below, and if you look nice and close, the middle one here is our 3D printed one. And as soon as we did that, we thought, wow, this is a great way to generate floriated initials for a star because there’s decorative elements in effect on the surface. But for me, it was the mark of the machine. There’s a bit of a chatter in the middle, it’s coming down here, so it’s not just a mechanical extrusion of the plastic, but the machine itself is either throwing a wobbly or it’s deciding it wants to do the pattern a different way, and we thought that’s telling us something about how the machine is controlling a process that we as humans think is totally controllable. So that was an exercise in just the techne, the logic of how we could get this thing produced.

Then we started thinking, well, you know, can we do logotype? So here’s one that we’ve done, and as you can see, handmade. And so we were there playing with can we extrude type, what’s the nature of the plastic that we have to use, what kind of honeycomb texture inside do we need to be able to get a block that doesn’t compress too much, and that might very well give us a blind emboss of a reasonable quality.

So I’m just going to lift this up, because underneath here — then the guy I’m working with, this is the nanotechnology guy — so then he did that block, and then at his printer, he can, not at the point of generating the font file, but at the point of instructing the printer, you can get different textures, because different ways in which the type is then actually extruded, or the plastic’s actually extruded.

So we started thinking a little bit more about possibilities. He’s done a San Serge letter set for us, he’s been playing with can we go really thin, rather than having the real top block, can we go as thin as this? And what we found is — comms and marketing have been doing an article for us, so you can see there it’s called the digital handmade, so we’ve been playing with fonts to be able to get a few things roaring.

Now, one of the reasons we started thinking about going to plastic was because of this phenomenon. Now, the indigenous language for New Zealand, as you know, is Te Reo, Te Reo Maori, and the conventional form for orthography is the macron. So since none of the wood or metal types that I have — this is all in reverse, you see? So since none of the fonts that we have have embedded accents, let alone the macron, we thought, oh, this is a way to think about what’s possible in that space. Likewise, we have the only collection — and you would have seen on the website — the only collection of Chinese types — in New Zealand, which is pretty cool. So if you look between the large, the uppercase, beautiful Gaudi caps there, there’s a whole bunch of different Chinese characters, and so we thought — the student who’s working on the Chinese characters, she’s doing a master’s on bilingual signage. She’s also helping to restore those types, and she’s really interested in how we can basically create new digital fonts which might very well be, again, 3D printed fonts that then get analog printed to think about modularity of type.

So there’s somebody in Montreal at UQAM, l’Université du Québec à Montréal, Judith Poirier, and she’s been playing with Inuit types and modularizing them, so she was out here a couple of years ago, and we really got inspired by her work. So I guess it’s the digital handmade that is sort of one of the characteristics of both the teaching work that we do and the print output.

So as part of the big Marsden Grant, which is the largest humanities grant that’s available in New Zealand, from the Royal Society of New Zealand, as part of that grant, I’ve been exploring serendipity and palimpsests. Palimpsests are easy to configure, because you think of the layers that you do with printing, but serendipity is part of the researcher’s tool kit. So we ended up curating an exhibition at the Turnbull Gallery downtown called Unexpected Connections, Colenso and his Contemporaries, and we did it all as a cabinet of curiosities space, with taxidermy, and with obviously print, and we had botanical specimens, paintings, just everything. We had a couple of wonderful chairs from the Wellington Maritime Museum in the middle, and basically people were to make their own connections between objects, and we had a digital artwork in conjunction with that. So I’ve just shot through the URL for that (https://wai-te-ata-press.qitlab.io/unexpected/#/)

EF: Thank you.

SS: Because I’ve got one image up there, and there’s a little bit about the physical show.

So basically what happens is that we’ve got about 350 digital assets in the system. When you push — when you open the website, you’ll see there’s a little round arrow, and when you push that, you generate a new composite, and it uses a randomized algorithm to select five of the digital assets, and then has six operations, sort of like a dice, six operations that can be performed on each asset, and that can be rendering them transparent, resizing them, cropping them, repeating them, a whole bunch of things happen. But the point is you never know what this piece of amazing art is going to look like.

And it’s got us thinking about, again, in the digital handmade register, about the nature of digital materiality. Because my next step for this digital artwork is to then 3D print the five items as plates, and then analog print them. Not to replicate the digital artwork, but to see within the letterpress technology what the affordances of the technology are to create another creation, you know, another creative artwork that riffs off the digital one.

So I guess what I’m trying to do is close the loop all the time, trying to make technology seem not as disruptive, but as part of the really innovative creative practice where you intersect technologies all the time. And so while I love the idea of media archeology, for me it’s archeology that’s living in the present.

So Literary Atlas. Literary Atlas was an opportunity through an interdisciplinary research fund which had certain requirements to collaborate with people outside your faculty. They specifically came to me and said, “we want a digital humanities something or other,” and so we started thinking, knowing how intensive it is to create your own digital assets and structure them and everything for a digital humanities project, what have we already got at the university that we could use, and because we have a long text legacy of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre that was based on the University of Virginia Tech Center, it was a case of what do they have that can profile New Zealand writing, and particularly Wellington, and for those writers that have a link to Victoria, what can we do? And it was a case of, you know, hey, presto, why don’t we think about a Literary Atlas?

So when we went and pitched the idea to some of the design students, they were really keen, because they’re working in augmented reality. They said it’s a prime opportunity for them to develop some new ways of thinking about mobile apps for an augmented engine experience, some new work on the back end, with the database linking to the gaming ingenuity that will then deliver the augmented reality experience. And for them, because although they’re in design, it’s mostly industrial design, and digital media design, they actually don’t have typography as one of — at the moment we don’t have a graphic design program, but they don’t have typography as a single course that they would learn what to do with type.

So we decided to look at the Wellington Waterfront Walk, where there’s all those poets all immersed in the water or not, and the guys went down there, they selected three of the writers that had a link to Victoria, and then they’ve started playing with what they can do to give an interactive experience, which is not only you go to the site and you see the type itself being unleashed in really interesting sort of kinetic typography forms, but also how can the person who’s experienced that feel that they are taking away part of that experience in the form of found poem.

So they’re currently working on the app where you can actually drag and drop some of the animated letter forms, if not words. And if we can manage it at 140 characters, then they would have a found poem fragment that they can tweet out and then put it into an archive that consecutively then becomes individual lines of a continually reinvented found poem.

So we haven’t released the app yet, but that’s why I put their blogging journal of their research journey on the website, the bespoke website that we’ll get, that would be part of it as well. So it’s showing everybody the journey they took to where they’re going, and not only some of the design decisions, but some of the wacky conversations that we’ve had to get to that point.

So as you can see, it’s a case of not siloing any one component of what the press is all about, but thinking about it as an integrated whole and ways in which we can cross fertilize between the printing, the teaching, and the research, in this world where — one of my mantras is honor the content, so whatever comes in the door, whatever we invite into the shop, how can we best release that content in a form using what technology is most appropriate, something that really, you know, puts the reader or the viewer or the visitor or the user right at the center of that experience.

And it’s part of what Johanna Drucker talks about in terms of performative materiality and thinking about digital materiality, not as a fixed thing, but as something that’s always in flux, always in process, always changing through modes of transmission and changing through users.

So it’s really a fun dynamic space to play in, and the fact that we also create things as part of the process.

EF: To sort of shift gears again, my next question is due to the focus of the course I’m taking, which had us starting out looking at humanities labs before shifting into talking about the digital humanities. I saw on your website that you identify the press as a teaching laboratory. So I’m curious about what led to that as a way in which you think about the space and the work you do there?

SS: I guess it’s partly because I’m a real believer in collaboration and teamwork, and while some humanists demonize the lab model as belonging exclusively to science, and there’s a huge hierarchy and it’s only the big guys that get the name for themselves, for me, lab actually means a hub of experimentation and innovation.

So there’s any number of synonyms you could use for lab. You could use hub, which we use for our digital history hub, innovation hubs, innovation labs are really common parlance within the digital space now, through digital media, data artists, digital humanists, but I think laboratory really gives you the sense that it’s a place of experimentation, and for me that’s an important dimension, experimenting with our materials, experimenting with those in the context of specific projects, but also just a space to realize researchable potential.

So that’s sort of why we’ve got teaching lab and book arts studio, we’ve got our Chinese scholar studio, we’ve got our digital history hub, but for me, the principles underlying all of those are the same, you know, teamwork, collaboration, really buzzy environments for cross fertilizing and this idea of experimentation is really core.

EF: Thank you. I’m curious too, since I’ve only been able to get glances of your space: what has determined the organization of your space?

SS: This is the seventh space that the press has been in since it was founded in 1962, and it was called Wai-te-ata Press because it lived in a garage that was below the house — the old house that was the English department. Not sure if you prowled around Wai-te-ata Road while you were here, but it’s sort of that next level down from the library, and there’s a whole bunch of old houses there, the Stout Research Centre, the Health Centre, the Education Centre, and now the Campus Services, they’re all in those old houses.

So this was one garage, then it became two garages, and then it moved across to what was called the Printing Office on the Parade, so there was another garage on Kelburn Parade. Then it moved into the basement of the Music Building, and then when I arrived, it was relocated to what was the Central Services Building, and now the Malaghan Institute, the round building at the back, and there were two locations there that I moved into.

And then when they were talking about refurbishing the library, the then university librarian, who had a soft spot for Wai-te-ata and who had had the university bindery under his wing, which was in one of the spaces we went into in Malaghan, said, you know, before I leave, I want to find a permanent home for you. And so he suggested that we go into this level zero space here in the library.

I was delighted because it was just the most obvious place where Wai-te-ata Press should be, you know, sort of words meet culture, meet everything else. And the light was good, and the configuration of the space is such that I came from — and I can’t remember the square meterage — but I came from a space where we had all in the one space, store area, a classroom, and then the whole press room area.

Came into this space where the configuration was a bit different. We’ve got the press room that you’ve seen, we’ve got an office and a storeroom, we’ve got a foyer area that is an exhibition space at the bottom of one of the internal stairway accesses, and then the classroom was across the — separate from the press room.

When we came to think about work flows, and where all the equipment that had been accumulated over 50 plus years would go, a colleague of mine–I call him my technical adviser to the universe–who was a letterpress trained printer, he’s a book designer and a publisher, work for Government Print and some of the major publishing houses, he and I sat down to work out what the configuration of the press room would be like, so that what we end up having is you come in the door, you’ve got the type setting area, so we have a selection of the fonts most commonly used, sort of in this part of the world.

So we come in the front door, you come around, okay, so then you’ve got all your cases with type, and those are configured not only with the long type frames, but also in pods of four cases. So we’ve got four different setting stations for the teaching, and then the presses are over in this part of the world by the windows so there’s good light, so you can see what you’re doing, and even if the power’s not on, you can still print.

We’ve got then our library behind the big screen, and that’s mostly my personal collection, but it helps support the teaching. We also have the multipurpose storage plan cabinets that store some of our wood type, and on the top are multipurpose for meetings, for binding, for sketching, just doing about everything. So that’s the press room.

So it’s in the discrete areas that you would expect, but it’s all in one fluid space. So you’ve got the type setting, you’ve got the printing, you’ve got the binding all under one, but that meant we had to declutter the space. So apart from the very cluttered office where we have all our research assistants as well as me, so at any one time we can have three people working in this space, then we have our story area, which has this mammoth, we call it the green elephant, our SP25 poster press. We’ve got our paper stores living in plan cabinets.

We’ve got our galleys and galley cabinets here, stuff, but one of the solutions to the fact that there’s lots of cases that don’t fit into their cabinets, I devised this set of basically a type library, framing, so that on the upper two stories, we’ve got the overflow wood types and then on the lower two bays, we’ve got the metal types, and what that is is just easy to slide in and out, you can see what’s out, you’re not restricted by the usual type case or type frame of which there are, you know, three or four or five different widths, but you’ve got these flanges that enable you to, irrespective of the width of the case, pull your types in and out and they still fit there. So that storage area — oh, yeah, and a couple more presses. You know how it goes.

So yeah, it’s a quite strategic way in which the place is being organized, and that’s really a function of the diversity of tasks we do within the printing environment, and also it has to be flexible, because we’ll host meetings, we have launches here for all sorts of things, like not only book launches but special diplomatic functions, and we have tours and demos where we can take, you know, between 20 and 30 people at once. So there’s got to be enough breathing room around the space, as well as it has to be a good working space for students working in teams, and for us to, you know, keep sane in the midst of a number of projects. So it was really quite carefully scoped out.

EF: Thank you very much for that tour. I think you’ve covered about everything that I was curious about today.